Colin Clout's calendar. The record of a summer. April-October

81

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND
MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID

3N6FEUPW

CALENDAR.

By GRANT ALLEN.

New York:

FUNK & W A ON ALLS,
1O and 12 D«y Street.

79,

PKEVIOUS numbers of this LIBRARY were known by the name STANDARD SERIES.
A list of these 79 books will be found on the 3d page of the cover of this volume. They
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standard books, and are very cheap.

COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

A RECORD OF A SUMMER.

By GRAN.T ALLEN.

We present our readers with some wonderful lessons, read to us by the charming
naturalist, Grant Allen, from Nature's great book of secrets. At this season of the
year, when Nature puts on her genial glow, and comes to us with a smiling face and a
light heart, this great lover of flowers, birds, and thousands of other objects, tells in
beautiful language the facts which by close communion he has drawn from them — the
strategy of flowers,the plots, plans,and guileless cunning of plants. The primrose is much
more than a primrose to him, and our author demonstrates that the " unknown far
transcends the known." Lovers of flowers, birds, plants, etc., etc., will prize this book
most highly.

WHAT THE ENGLISH PRESS SAYS:

The Leeds Mercury, speaking of Mr. Allen's books, declares them to be " the best
specimens of popular scientific expositions that we have ever had the good fortune to fall
in with.'1''

The Edinburgh Scotsman says of the author : "There can be no doubt of Mr. Grant
Allen's competence as a writer o"n natural history subjects."

The Manchester Examiner says : " Mr. Allen's method of treatment gives a sort of
personality and human character to the trout or strawberry blossom which invests them
Avith additional charm, and makes many of his pages read more like a fanciful fairy tale
than a scientific work. . . . Mr. Allen's essays ought to open many a half-closed eye.
. . . Mr. Allen possesses that genuine feeling for Nature which makes a man find
unfailing delight not merely in a survey from th6 mountain tops and a walk over the
breezy moorland, but in the weeds by the roadside and hedge-bank."

The Glasgow Herald remarks : "In some of Mr. Allen's sketches he almost gives
the idea that he is playing at being a naturalist, but he is ever an easy, graceful, and
ligbt-hearted observer of nature. . . . His varying moods will serve to interest
and enchanr, the reader who, while disdaining more solid fare in popular science, will
yet listen to the teachings of so skilled a mentor as Mr. Allen proves himself to be."

NUMBERS.

PAXTON HOOD'S LIFE OP CROMWELL. No. 80, STANDARD LIBRARY <NTo. 1,
1883 Series). Price, 25 cents.

SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTERS. Br W. MATTIKU WILLIAMS, F.R.S.A.,
F.C.S. No. 81, STANDARD LIBRARY (No. 2, 1883 Series). Price, 25 cenis.

AMERICAN HUMORISTS. Br R. H. HAWEIS. No. 82, STANDARD LIBRA ir
(No. 3, 1883 Series). Price, 15 cents.

LIVES OF ILLUSTRIOUS SHOEMAKERS. BY WILLIAM EDWARD WINKS.
No. 83, STANDARD LIBRARY (No. 4, 1883 Series). Price, 25 cents.

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. BY THOMAS GIBSON BOWLES. No. 84, STANDARD
LIBRARY (No. 5, 1883 Series). Price, 25 cents.

THE HIGHWAYS OF LITERATURE; OR, WHAT TO READ AND How TO READ.
BY DAVID PRYDE, M.A.. LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.S.A., ETC. No. 85, STANDARD LIBRARY
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From hundreds of periodicals in all sections of the country we have received the most
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" Had there been an Act of Congress empowering FUNK d; WA ON ALLS, the Ne>"
York Publishers, to drive out bad literature by substituting good , at a price within f //_•'.
r^ach, of all. the firm could not have done better than it is doing. . . . There is t/n'
AMERICAN HUMORIST, the lu.«t issue, printed in dear, but not staring type, onfit-.>
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good cigar ! "

COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

THE EEOOED OF A SUMMER.
APRIL-OCTOBER.

BY

GRANT ALLEN

AUTHOR or "THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE," "VIGNETTES FROM NATURE," ETC

NEW YORK:

FUNK & WAGNALLS, PUBLISHERS,
10 AND 12 DEY STREET.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in 1883, by

FUNK & WAGNALLS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congrese at Washington.

PREFACE.

THE greater number of the papers are botanical,
and these, I hope, will be found to contain some
new and original views. The remainder, dealing
with the animal world, though not, I trust, mere
transcripts, owe more to such previous and more
serious works as those of Mr. Darwin, Mr. A. R.
Wallace, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and Professor
Weismann. I ought also to express my indebt-
edness in the botanical portion to Dr. Bentham,
Sir Joseph Hooker, Professor Sachs, and other

standard authors.

GK A

CONTENTS.

PAGE

I. PRIMROSE TIME 7

II. THE RETURN OP THE SWALLOWS 13

III. THE BEGINNINGS OP SPRING 19

IV. WILD HYACINTHS 24

V. THE TROUT JUMP 30

VI. CATKINS AND ALMOND BLOSSOM 36

VII. SPRING FLOWERS 40

VIII. RHUBARB SPROUTS 45

IX. THE SWALLOWS AGAIN 50

X. THE GREEN LEAP 55

XI. THE FLOWERING OF THE GRASSES 60

XII. THE SUBMERGED FOREST G6

XIII. A SUMMER TRIP 71

XIV. THE CLOVER BLOOMS 76

XV. EARLY SEEDTIME 83

XVI. A SQUIRREL'S NEST 89

XVII. FOES IN THE HAYFIELD 94

XVIII. HAYMAKING BEGINS 100

XIX. THE MOLE AT HOME 106

XX. JULY FLOWERS Ill

XXI. CHERRIES ARE RIPE 117

XXII. DOG-ROSE AND BRAMBLES 123

XXIII. SUNDEW AND BUTTERWORT 129

XXIV. WHITE RABBITS AND WHITE HARES 135

XXV. THISTLEDOWN BLOWS 140

XXVI. SCARLET GERANIUMS.. 146

vi CONTENTS.

PAGE

XXVII. RAIN ON THE ROOT CROPS 152

XXVIII. HOPS BLOSSOM 159

XXIX. THE DEPARTURE OF THE SWIFTS 165

XXX. WATERSIDE WEEDS 170

XXXI. ASPARAGUS BERRIES 176

XXXII. THE KERNING OF THE WHEAT. 182

XXXIII. THE ORIGIN OF GROUSE 188

XXXIV. PLUMS RIPEN 193

XXXV. THE PEAR HARVEST 199

XXXVI. SOME ALPINE CLIMBERS 205

XXXVII. SOME AMERICAN COLONISTS 211

XXXVIII. THE WEEDS OF BEDMOOR 217

XXXIX. THOR'S HAMMER.. 222

COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

i.

PRIMROSE TIME.

. YESTERDAY, April showers chased one another across
the meadows all day long, corning and going between
interludes of fathomless blue sky and vivid sunshine,
the fleecy clouds being driven like sheep before a collie
by the brisk south-westerly breezes. To-day, the Fore
Acre is smiling accordingly with lusher grass, and the
bustling bees are busier among fresher and sweeter prim-
roses. For the Fore Acre is not a level field, like most
others on the farm : it slopes down in broken terraces
from the barton to the banks of Venlake, as we call
our little streamlet in the valley below ; and it is the
slope tlrat makes it the best spot near the homestead for
primroses to grow on. These pet fancies and predilec-
tions of the flowers, indeed, are not without full and
satisfactory reasons of their own. The plant chooses its
proper haunt with due regard to its special needs and
functions. It seeks warmth and shelter in some cases ;
bracing moorland air in others ; moisture and shade,
or sun and open space, according to the peculiar tastes
and habits it has inherited from its remotest ancestors.
We lordly human beings are, perhaps, too apt to over-
look the essential community of life and constitution be-

8 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

tween ourselves and the plants. We underestimate their
unconscious intelligence and their guileless cunning ; we
forget that in their insentient fashion they plot and plan
and outwit one another with almost human semblance of
intentional strategy. Yet those of us who live much in
their society learn at last to recognize that there is a
meaning and a purpose in everything they do — a use for
every little unnoticed point of structure or habit in their
divinely ordered economy. Even the very date of their
flowering has a settled purpose of its own, and bears
some definite reference to the insect that brings the pol-
len, or to the time needed for ripening and setting the
seed. To watch the succession of these little members
of the floral commonwealth, to learn the connection in
which they stand to one another, and to interpret the
purpose that they severally have in view — these are the
great problems and the self-sufficing rewards of those
who slowly spell out for themselves from living hiero-
glyphics the emblems of the country calendar.

See from the edge of the hillside here how the prim-
roses cling, as it were on purpose, to the tumble slopes
and banks of the Fore Acre, leaving almost flowerless
the level platforms of terrace between them. Each little
bank or escarpment is a perfect natural flower-bed, thick-
ly covered- from top to bottom with beautiful masses of
tufted yellow bloom. But in between, on the interme-
diate grassy bits, there are no primroses ; or, to speak
more correctly, all the primroses there are cowslips,
their tall scapes not yet much more than just raised
above the level of the greensward. For at bottom prim-
roses and cowslips are really identical : even the old-
fashioned botanists have freely allowed that much, and
have reunited the two varieties as a single species under
a common name. The leaves are absolutely indistinguisk-

PRIMROSE TIME. 9

able, as you observe when you look closely at them ;
the structure of the individual flowers is the same in all
important points : they only differ in the arrangement
of the blossoms on the stem ; and even in that the two
forms are connected by every intermediate stage in the
third dubious variety known as the oxlip. Why, then,
do cowslips differ from primroses .at all ? For a very
simple yet ingenious reason.

The true primrose almost always grows on a bank or
slope, where its blossoms can readily be seen by the bees
and other fertilizing insects without the need for any tall
common flower-stalk. Hence its stalk is undeveloped,
as the scientific folk put it — in other words, it never pro-
duces one at all to speak of. Each separate primrose
springs by a distinct stem from a very stumpy and dwarf-
ish thick little stock, which represents the same organ as
the long and graceful stalk of the cowslip. This stock
is so short that it is quite hidden by the close rosette of
downy wrinkled leaves ; but if you examine it carefully
you will see that the flowers are arranged upon it in an
umbel or circular group, exactly like that of its taller
and slenderer nodding relative. Each primrose blossom
is also larger, so as more easily to secure the attention of
the passing bee. In the cowslip, on the other hand,
growing as it usually does on level ground, the common
stalk has acquired a habit of lengthening out prodig-
iously, so as to raise its clustered bunch of flowers well
above the ground and the surrounding grasses, and thus
catch the eye of some roaming insect, who could never
have perceived its buried blossoms if they were laid as
close to the grass-clad earth as in the case of the neighbor
primroses. The two varieties have now become prac-
tically almost distinct, because each naturally sticks to its
own best- adapted haunts, and is usually crossed only by

10

pollen of its own kind. But the oxlip is a sort of unde-
cided tertium quid, an undifferentiated relic of the old
undivided ancestral form, which grows in intermediate
situations, and crosses now with one plant and now with
the other, so preventing either from finally taking its
stand as a truly separate species.

The reason why the thoroughgoing primroses do not
cross with the thoroughgoing cowslips is easy enough to
understand : they are seldom both in blossom together.
This, again, naturally results from the form and habit of
the two flowers. In both, the head of bloom is produced
from material laid by during the past year in the peren-
nial rootstock ; and in both, the buds begin to sprout as
soon as the weather grows warm enough for them to
venture forth with safety. But the " rathe primrose"
bursts into blossom first, because it has only to produce
short subsidiary stalks for each separate flower ; the cow-
slip lingers somewhat later, because it has to send up a
stout common stem, besides forming the minor pedicels
for the individual cups. Their other differences are all
of similar small kinds. The primrose, standing straight
up from the earth, receives the fertilizing bee or butter-
fly on the face of its wide-open corolla ; the cowslip, a
little pendulous by nature, receives its guest from below,
or from one side, and so has its blossom more bell-shaped
as well as less widely expanded. The primrose is pale to
suit its own special insect visitors ; the cowslip is a deeper
yellow, melting almost into orange, to meet the tastes of
a somewhat different and perhaps more daintily aesthetic
circle. At bottom, however, both flowers are very nearly
the same, and their peculiarities are all specially intended
to insure a very high type of cross-fertilization.

Observe that in both flowers the corolla, though deeply
divided into five notched lobes or sections, is yet not

PRIMROSE TIME. 11

really composed of separate petals, but tapers beneath
into a very long and narrow tube. Cowslips and prim-
roses belong by origin to the great division of five-petalled
flowers ; for all blossoms originally had their parts ar-
ranged either in sets of threes or in sets of fives ; and
this distinction, though often obscured, is still the most
fundamental one between all flowering species. But in
the primrose, as in many other advanced types, the five
primitive petals have coalesced at their bases into a single
tube, so as to make the honey accessible, only to bees,
butterflies, and other insects with a long proboscis, who
could benefit the plant by duly effecting the transfer of
pollen from the stamens of one flower to the sensitive
surface of another. In blossoms with open petals many
thieving little creatures come in sideways and steal the
honey without going near the pollen at all : in a better
adapted flower like the primrose such a mischance is
rendered impossible.

Notice, too, that in both varieties the eye or centre of
the corolla is deep orange, while the outside is lighter in
tone. This difference in color acts as a honey -guide, and
directs the bee straight to the mouth of the tube at whose
base the nectar is stored. And now again, let us cut
open one or two flowers of each variety, so as to lay bare
the interior of the tube. See, they have each two sepa-
rate and corresponding forms, known long ago to village
children as the thrum-eyed and the pin-eyed primroses
or cowslips. In the pin-eyed form the long head of the
pistil, looking for all the world like an old-fashioned
round-headed pin, reaches just to the top of the tube,
and forms the prominent object in the centre, while the
five stamens are fastened to the side of the tube about
half way down. In the thrum-eyed form, on the con-
trary, the stamens make a little ring at the top of the

tube, while the pin-headed summit of the pistil only
reaches just half way up the tube, exactly opposite the
same spot where the stamens are fixed in the other sort.
When the bee begins by visiting a thrum-eyed blossom,
she collects a quantity of pollen on the hairs at the top
of her proboscis. If she then visits a second flower of
the same type, she does not fertilize its pistil, but only
gathers a little more pollen. As soon, however, as she
reaches a pin-eyed blossom she unconsciously deposits
some of this store of pollen on the sensitive surface or
pin of its pistil ; while at the same time some more
pollen, half way down the tube, clings to her proboscis,
and is similarly rubbed off against the pistil of the next
thrum-eyed blossom she chances to visit. The exact cor-
respondence in position of the various parts in the two
diverse forms admirably insures their due impregnation.
Thus each blossom is not only fertilized from another
flower, but even from a flower of an alternative type,
which is a peculiarly high modification of the ordinary
method.

II.

THE RETURN OF THE SWALLOWS.

LAST week's showers, much longed for and anxiously
expected after the apparently endless spell of bitter east
winds, have brought out the meadows at last into the
full fresh green of early spring. The buds upon the
horse-chestnuts, which stood idle and half-open for so
many days, have now finally burst forth into delicate
sprays of five-fingered foliage ; and the young larches
among the hillside hangers are revelling in the exquisite
and tender freshness of verdure which larches alone can
exhibit, and even they only for two short weeks of April
weather. As for the hedgerows, I really think I can never
recollect anything to equal them. The innumerable pecks
of March dust from which we have been suffering seem
to have brought forth gold enough in the celandines and
crowfoots for many royal ransoms ; and the masses of
primroses on the sunny banks are both thicker in tufts of
bloom and with larger individual blossoms than I ever be-
fore remember to have seen them. The copses on Woot-
ton Hill are carpeted with daffodils, wood-anemones, and
hyacinths, in great patches of yellow, blue, and white ;
and it is no wonder that to-day I should have seen the
swallows, enticed back from their winter quarters in Al-
geria by the sun and the flowers, flying low above the
gorse and the violet-beds in the undercliff, where they may
now catch hundreds of small insects on the wing around
the honey -bearing blossoms which attract them out of
their cocoons upon these warmer and brighter mornings.

14 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

What marvellous complexity of interaction and mutual
relations between all the parts of nature and organic life
this familiar fact of the swallows' yearly return implies
for us ! Hard-billed seed-eating and berry-eating birds,
or mixed seed-eaters and insect-eaters, can manage to
find food for themselves in England all the year round.
Kay, even those species which live mainly upon worms,
slugs, and other hardy small deer, can pick up a living
somehow or other through our northern winters. But
pure fly-catchers, like the swallows, must starve during
the five months when winged insects are almost wholly
lacking in temperate climates. Thus it becomes a mat-
ter of necessity with them to move south at the begin-
ning of autumn, toward the orange groves of Italy and
the palms of Africa. Before they can return, there
must be insects in the north ; and these insects must have
been hatched from the egg, and re-hatched from the
chrysalis stage, before they are fitted to become food for
swallows, since swallows feed only on the wing. Ac^
cordingly, it is not until the spring flowers are well out,
and the winged insects have begun to suck their honey,
that the various species of the swallow family make their
appearance.

The true swallows come first, and, taking one year
with another, the second week of April may be taken as
the average date of their return to the south-western
counties of England ; but this year the spring, in spite
of its early promise, has hung fire a little in a curious
half -hesitating way ; and so I have not seen the first
swallow till this morning. The swifts, larger and
stronger birds, which fly even more incessantly than
their cousins and therefore require a more abundant
food-supply, do not usually come northward till the be-
ginning of May, when the flowers and insects are in full

THE RETURN OF THE SWALLOWS. 15

force ; and they leave us again in August, while the
swallows linger on till the late autumn. Both kinds fly
low and open-mouthed over the most flowery meadows,
where they catch honey-sucking insects in abundance ;
or over the ponds and rivers, where they meet with in-
numerable mayflies and* other winged species, whose
larvae live as caddis-worms or the like under water, while
the perfect insects hover above it to lay their eggs upon
the surface.

The question as to the supposed instinctive feelings
which drive the swallows north or south at the proper
season is an extremely interesting one ; and perhaps only
very recent views as to the nature of climatic changes
and zones can enable us in time to give the true explana-
tion. Hitherto it has been usual to think of the differ-
ences of climate between Europe and Africa as though
they had always been permanent, and so to raise unneces-
sary difficulties in the way of a rational solution to the
problem. If England had always had a cold winter,
while Algeria always had a warm one, and if a double
belt of sea had always separated us from the two conti-
nents, it would indeed be hard to understand how an
English bird could first bethink itself of moving south-
ward in winter, or how an Algerian bird could ever be
seized with an original impulse to go northward in the
spring-time. It is not surprising, therefore, that early
naturalists should have taken refuge in the hypothesis of
a special instinct implanted in the swallows, independ-
ently of experience, and prompting them to seek the ap-
propriate climate by some unknown " sense of direction"
at the proper times of year. But, with our existing
knowledge as to the past history of European geography
and meteorology, no such cutting of the Gordian knot is
now necessary.

16 COLIX CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

We know that the climate of England in comparatively
recent times was apparently as warm as that of North
Africa ; and we know that at the same period the beds
of the Mediterranean and the English Channel were dry
land. Hence it was then at least as easy for the swifts
and swallows to range from Scotland to Sahara as it now
is in America for the hardier humming-birds to range
from Canada to Mexico. But when the change of " cos-
mical weather" made England by slow degrees too cold
in winter for flowers and midges to flourish all the year
round, the swallows would begin gradually to fly a little
to the south, as each autumn came on, and remove a lit-
tle to the north again as spring returned. At first, no
doubt, they would only have to shift their quarters very
slightly in search of more plentiful food, without them-
selves being conscious of any special migration. In
course of time, however, as the difference in climate be-
came more and more marked, the birds would have to
fly further and further south with each successive
autumn, and would be enticed further and further north
again to their original homes with each successive spring.
Thus at last the practice of migration would become
engrained in the nervous system, and would grow into
what we ordinarily call an instinct — that is to say, an
untaught habit. This is the stage at which the migratory
custom has always remained in America, where broad
stretches of land extend from the Arctic, region to the
tropical forests, unbroken by any intermediate zone of
severing sea.

In Europe, however, special circumstances have added
another and more complicated element to the problem —
the element of discontinuity. The Mediterranean, the
English Channel, and the Baltic practically cut off the
various parts of the swallows' summer hunting-grounds

THE RETURN OF THE SWALLOWS. 17

from their African wintering-places. To get from Eng-
land to Algiers, many swallows fly over wide expanses
of sea, far too broad to see across, and therefore quite
destitute of landmarks. It is simple enough to find one's
way by land from Canada to Mexico ; but it is quite an-
other thing to find one's way across the sea, without a
compass, from Algeria to Marseilles : yet this is the
route annually taken by one large body of northward-
bound swallows. Dr. Weismann, however, has suggest-
ed an ingenious and fairly satisfactory explanation of the
difficulty. He points out that the lines taken by the
swallows and other migratory birds correspond on the
whole with the shallowest parts of the Mediterranean,
where it is most intersected by peninsulas and islands.
When the Mediterranean valley began to sink below the
sea-level it must at first have produced two or three large
lakes in the deepest portions of its bed ; and between
these lakes there must have been connecting belts of
land, now marked respectively by Sicily and Italy, by
Sardinia and Corsica, and by Gibraltar and Tangiers,
with their uniting submarine banks. Of these the Span-
ish belt is still almost entire, and it offers no special diffi-
culty ; the others are now broken up into peninsulas or
islands. Dr. Weismann supposes that various flocks of
birds grew accustomed to proceed north or south along
one such connecting belt, while the land was still in pro-
cess of subsiding ; and that their descendants still con-
tinue to follow the same lines till they reach the final
headlands, and then fly straight over sea in a definite
direction till they sight the opposite land. The younger
birds follow their elders ; while the elders themselves
have learned the proper landmarks and directions from,
similarly following their own predecessors, and gradually
take the lead in their turn as the seniors drop off one

18 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

by one. Thus, if we may believe so plausible a theory,
by a sort of unconscious hereditary teaching the memory
of the lost land-connections has been handed down from
one generation to another since pre-glacial times. Were
Corsica and Sardinia now to sink slowly beneath the
waves, it is not difficult to conceive that the swallows
might still gather yearly upon the hills at Mentone, and
fly southward across the blank space to Tunis under
guidance of their most experienced elders.

III.

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING.

IN spite of the severe and long-continued cold, the
trees and flowers themselves seeni to have made tip their
minds that we are to have an early spring— at all events
here in the west country. The difference in the general
forwardness of vegetation between the two great slopes
on either side of England is this year extremely marked.
In Kent and Sussex the buds are still closely covered in
their dusky winter coats ; the flowers (save primroses)
have hardly begun as yet to straggle here and there in a
tentative way through the long-frozen soil ; and there is
scarcely a sign anywhere among the meadows or copses
that spring has set in at last. But in the south-western
counties it is quite otherwise. The gardens here are gay
already with bright golden borders of crocus ; snowdrops
are flourishing in the open air ; and jonquils and daffo-
dils are sending up their pale yellowish green leaves,
inclosing their tall scapes with the papery spathes halt'
revealing the slender buds within. On the horse-chest-
nut trees the dark gummy sheaths are just beginning to
open under the pressure of the wan and growing leaflets
which they have covered through the winter season ; the
hardier shrubs are already well in leaf, though the blades
are still folded together or only half expanded as yet ;
and even on the hedges the white-thorns are showing-
signs of life, the little fresh pink scales bursting through
their brown and withered coverings, or even sometimes
showing a tiny green tip at the very end of a growing

20 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

bough. When I break off the smaller branches I can see
by the bright green and sappy look of the inner bark
that the bushes are actively engaged in putting forth
chlorophyl, arid that a few days more of these warm
westerly breezes will bring out the buds into leaves, at
least in the sheltered southern hollows and combes.

This wide difference of climate between the Atlantic
slopes — open chiefly to the influences of the Gulf Stream
and the warm breezes which blow across it — and the east-
ern half of Britain, which lies right in the teeth of the
Siberian east winds, has even stamped itself permanently
on the character and distribution of our flora. Many of
our plants of warmer types are only found in the south-
west. The high moor, on which I have come out to-day
for my morning's stroll, covered even now by little white
and short-stemmed daisies — they will grow taller- and
pinker as the spring advances — is Claverton Down ; and
Claverton Down is the only station in England for a
particular species of hairy spurge, of which in fact I am
now in search.

It is not in itself a particularly interesting plant, being
very little different from the other spurges, all of which
are mere rank woodland or wayside weeds, with curious
green and black flowers, more noticeable to the botanist
than to the ordinary observer. But the fact that it is
found nowhere else in Great Britain except on this spot,
one of the warmest and most forward hill districts in the
south of England, gives it an adventitious value for every
collector, and a real one for the student of botanical his-
tory. Evidently, the hairy spurge grows here, and only
here, because, being a mountain species of warmer cli-
mates, Claverton Down is the only hill in Britain at once
high enough and warm enough to suit it. This explana-
tion sufficiently accounts for its absence elsewhere, but

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING. 21

not quite for its presence here. How did it get from the
Continent to Claverton Down ?

If the occurrence of the hairy spurge in England were
an isolated case, we might suppose that it had been acci-
dentally imported by man, or that the seed had been
blown here by the wind, or that it had been carried over
by clinging to the feet of birds. Such accidents do un-
doubtedly account for many special facts of distribution
and acclimatization — for example, all oceanic islands, as
Mr. Wallace has amply shown, are peopled with mere
waifs and strays of various distant faunas and floras in
just this fragmentary fashion. But the case of the
spurge is by no means a solitary one ; on the contrary,
the south-western districts of England and of Ireland are
full of peculiar species found in no other parts of Brit-
ain. Thus a pretty little purple lobelia, a familiar plant
in southern France and Spain, is alone found with us on
a single common near Axminster in Devon. So, too,
Cornwall and the Scilly Isles are rich in southern forms.
The arbutus, or strawberry tree, which grows so abun-
dantly, with its white bell -shaped blossoms and its pretty
red berries, over the Provencal hills, is met again quite
unexpectedly on the mountains of Kerry. The Mediter-
ranean heath — that beautiful white scented heather which
every visitor to the Pyrenees has gathered in spring
among the pine-woods of Pau and Arcachon — turns up
once more a thousand miles off in Connemara. Alto-
gether, no fewer than twelve Spanish species are found
in south-western Ireland, and in no other part of Brit-
ain ; while similar species extend to Pembrokeshire, or
are peculiar to the south-western peninsula of England
and the Mediterranean or Spain and Portugal. A spe-
cial Portuguese slug and a few other southern animals
are also found under the same conditions.

22 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

Clearly it would be absurd to set down so many coin-
cidences between these warm western regions of Britain
and the Continent to the chapter of accidents alone.
Our south-western flora is undoubtedly on the whole a
Spanish and Pyrenean flora in its general aspect, with a
large intermixture of northern forms. Sometimes the
south European species linger on only in a single spot,
like the hairy spurge at Claverton Down and the purple
lobelia at Axminster ; sometimes they spread over wide
areas, and hold their own manfully against the intrusive
Scandinavian types. Of these curious phenomena the
probable explanation is suggested in a passing hint by
Mr. Wallace.

The southern plants are probably relics of the flora
which lived in Britain before the glacial epoch. At that
time, as our geologists are agreed in believing, Great
Britain and Ireland formed part of the continent of
Europe, to which they were united by a broad belt of
land, extending over the present bed of the English
Channel and the Bay of Biscay. As the ice pushed its
way southward, the northern plants migrated before it to
regions which were made more fit for them by the
change of climate due to the glaciating conditions.
Thus the arbutus, the Mediterranean heath, the various
warm types of saxifrages, of butterwort, and of spurge,
must have had a range from Killarney and Cornwall to
the Pyrenees, the Apennines, and Crete. It is notice-
able, too, that, according to the map recently published
by Dr. Geikie, the south-west of Ireland and England are
just the parts of Britain which escaped glaciation during
the height of the great ice age.

Yery possibly, however, these warmer plants may at
first have been driven quite southward, beyond the exist-
ing limits of Britain, but may afterward have moved

THE BEGIITSIXGS OF SPKING. 23

northward again as the ice melted. When the connect-
ing lands were washed away by the waves, or submerged
by alterations of level, the arbutus, the lobelia, and the
scented heath would be stranded, so to speak, in a few
warm corners of England, Wales, or Ireland, and would
be separated by many miles from all other specimens of
their race elsewhere. In some cases, no doubt, they
would be killed off by the intrusive Scandinavian forms,
which always show a singular power of living down all
opposition ; and as still warmer types would finally oc-
cupy the lowlands of southern France, when the ice age
was .quite over, it happens now that these insulated plants
live in the mountain districts only — the Pyrenees, Au-
vergne, and the Mediterranean islands, as well as in the
hill regions .of Kerry and Cornwall. The warmth de-
rived from the Gulf Stream and the insular position has
put the west coasts of our islands on a practical equality
with mountain-countries many degrees south of them.
The same climatic peculiarities which make the horse-
chestnuts bud a month earlier in the valley below me
than on the east coast have enabled the hairy spurges to
live on for ages among the combes and dells of this
broken oolitic down, in spite of their total separation
from the main body of their congeners elsewhere. Warm
nooks like Bath and Bournemouth, in fact, form as it
were climatic islands in the midst of our average British
temperature ; while in the sheltered spots of the Isle of
Wight the Italian arum and the woodland calamint live
on as wild plants, whereas they have long since been
totally extinguished by the cold in all the rest of Eng-
land.

IV.

WILD HYACINTHS.

THE path through the Fore Acre leads right across
Yenlake by tortuous windings to the tangled covert and
bosky marshland of Sedge wood Copse. There is some-
thing to my mind very sweet and melodious about these
dear old-world English names. Most of them go back
even beyond the Norman conquest. The Fore Acre, for
example, is so called, not because it once contained four
acres, as the laborers will tell you, but because it is the
acre or field lying just in front of the old immemorial
homestead. In early English acre simply means field ;
its later use as a definite measure of area, instead of the
hide, is a mere modern innovation. As a matter of fact,
the size of any particular Fore Acre depends usually
upon the purest chance — our own here is a very small
croft indeed — -and the Six Acres or Ten Acres of latter-
day farms are simply the results of false analogy on the
part of countrymen who have ministerpreted the good
old English phraseology of their forefathers. For ten
centuries, in all probability, the farmhouse and barton of
Shapwick Farm, for the time being, have stood on the
selfsame site that the modern stone buildings now oc-
cupy ; and the ancient name of the Fore Acre suffi-
ciently vouches for the fact.

So, too, in the word Yenlake we have another curious
old verbal relic ; for lake in our country dialect here-
abouts means brook or river. As to Sedge wood Copse,
that clearly derives its name from its marshy nature ; for

WILD HYACINTHS. 25

all the lower part of the wood along the banks of Yen-
lake is a deep morass of spongy bog, thickly and treach-
erously carpeted now in spring with an exquisite green
pile of glossy liverworts, pond weed, and brooklime.
But in the upper part, on the slope close by, great masses
of wild hyacinths are out in blossom, dyeing the whole
side of the copse a brilliant blue with their dainty droop-
ing heads of clustered flowers. Blue-bells we call them
here in the south ; but in the north that pretty name be-
longs rather to the hare-bell or heather- bell, which is the
true blue-bell of Scotland and of northern poets, growing
abundantly on all the bleak heather-clad hillsides of the
Highlands. Few flowers more distinctly mark an epoch
in the country calendar than these same tall and nodding
English wild hyacinths.

They blossom early, do the hyacinths, because they
have got a good stock of material in their bulb to go on
upon. Grub one up with your stick from the soft black
mould of the copse — they are not deeply buried, while
the mould is anything but stiff — and you will see that the
white bulb is large and well filled, especially in the
younger budding specimens. Cut it in two with a jack-
knife, and a clammy white juice exudes from its concen-
tric layers, rich in starches and gums for the supply of
the large thick-petalled flowers. These first spring blos-
soms are almost all bulbous ; otherwise they would not
be able to bloom so early in the year. Black Dog Mead
is now all full of buttercups which a townsman would
never know from the summer kind ; for the flowers are
just the same> and townsmen seldom trouble their heads
about stems, or roots, or foliage. But the countryman
knows the two weeds apart right well, for one is a much
more troublesome intruder in a meadow than the other.
This early form is the bulbous buttercup, and it flowers

26 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

first just because of its bulb. After it has withered and
set its seed, the regular meadow buttercups begin to blos-
som, having had time to collect enough material for their
flowers meanwhile. The leaves and root are quite differ-
ent, and so is the calyx ; and these minor peculiarities
are, no doubt, correlated in some curious way with the
various needs of the two plants, though no one can yet
tell us how.

It is just the same with the hyacinth. Its long blade-
like leaves laid by materials for growth last summer, and
stored them up in the bulb ; and that enables them now
to steal a march upon the annuals or thriftless perennials,
and to entice the spring insects long before their loiter-
ing rivals have got out of their buds. It is the early bell
that catches the bee. Only, both flowers and insects
need to follow one another in a fixed succession through-
out the year, or else there would not be food and visitors.
for both. The bees, too, have their calendar. Their
year begins with gorse and willow catkins ; goes on to
primroses and hyacinths ; continues with mint, thyme,
rampion, and heather ; and finishes up at last with hawk-
weed, hemp-nettle, and meadow-saffron. Where all the
bulbs, roots, and tubers can find room in the ground,
however, is a mystery ; for one and the same field will
be thick with flowers all the year round, from the celan-
dines of spring, with their little clustered pill-like nodules,
through the tuberous orchids and thick white-rooted dan-
delions of summer, to the bulbous squills and lady's-
tresses of late autumn. "When one thinks of them all
packed away side by side in the interstices of the stones
and grasses, one begins to understand what is meant by
the struggle for life in the world of plants.

The wild hyacinth is very essentially a bee-flower, one
of the kinds which have specially adapted themselves to

WILD HYACINTHS. 27

that one peculiar mode of insect fertilization. Its color
alone might give one a hint of its nature ; for blue is
the special hue affected by bees, and developed for the
most part by their selective agency. All the simplest
and most primitive flowers are yellow ; those a little
above them in the scale have usually become white ;
those rather more evolved are generally red or pink ;
and the highest grade of all, the blossoms peculiarly
modified for bees and butterflies, are almost always blue
or purple. Xow, one cannot look closely at a wild hya-
cinth without perceiving that it has undergone a good
deal of modification. It is, in fact, a very high type of
its 'own class. It belongs to that great family of flowrers
whose parts were originally arranged in rows of threes ;
but this original arrangement it almost seems at first sight
to have doubled. Count the parts, and you will find
that it has now six blue petals, with six stamens, one
stamen being gummed on, as it were, to each petal ;
while in the middle there is a single unripe pale-blue
seed-vessel. But in the primitive ancestor of all these
trinary flowers — one half of all flowering plants — there
were three calyx pieces, three petals, three outer sta-
mens, three inner stamens, and three seed-vessels. How,
then, are wre to account for these divergences in the
modern wild hyacinth ?

Why, if one looks closely it does not require much
imagination to see the threefold arrangement still in full
force, very little masked by small modifications. A
pocket-knife will often clear up a great many of these
difficulties ; and if the unripe seed-vessel of the wild
hyacinth be cut in two, the section at once shows that it
consists of three cells, united at their edges, and each
full of seeds. As Mrs. Malaprop would say, it is really
three distinct seed-vessels rolled into one. Such union

28 COLIK CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

of the carpels (as they are called technically) is always a
common concomitant of high development, and goes to-
gether with improved means of fertilization. In simpler
allied forms, such as the water-plantain, the three carpels
remain always distinct ; but in the more advanced lily
family, to which the wild hyacinth belongs, they have
universally coalesced into a single three-celled capsule.
In autumn, however, when the capsule is ripe, it splits
into three parts to shed the little shiny black seeds, and
then clearly manifests its original character.

Outside this triple fruit we get six stamens ; but if
you look close you can see that they are in two alternate
rows of three each, one set being a good deal longer than
the other. The stamens have grown almost into one
piece with the blue pteals ; yet the inner set have coa-
lesced less thoroughly than the outer, for you can pull
the three shorter ones off, but not the three longer ones.
Their coalescence is another device to insure more per-
fect fertilization, and to make the pollen adhere more
certainly to the visiting bees than in other flowers. Out-
side all we get the six blue petals, three of which are
really calyx pieces, indistinguishable in color and shape
from the true petals, but recognizable as to their real
nature by two signs — first, that they slightly overlap the
others, and secondly that they have the long stamens of
the outer row opposite to them and combined with
them. In all the lilies the calyx pieces and petals are
very much alike and similarly colored ; but in the wild
hyacinth the similarity is even closer than elsewhere.
This is doubtless due to the shape of the flower, which,
in order to accommodate its favorite bees, closely simu-
lates a true tubular blossom, like the Canterbury bell.
At first sight, indeed, one might almost take it for such
a perfect tube ; but when you pull it to pieces, you see

WILD HYACINTHS. 29

that the six apparent petals are really distinct, though
they converge so as practically to form a bell-flower,
with a tiny drop of honey glistening at its base. In the
true hyacinths of our gardens the six pieces have ac-
tually coalesced into a solid and well-soldered tube,
which marks a still higher level of adaptation to insect
visits ; and even our own wild species shows a slight ten-
dency in the same direction, for its pieces are often very
shortly united together at the bottom. It is from such
small beginnings as this that selective agency slowly pro-
duces the greatest changes ; and perhaps after the lapse
of many ages our own wild hyacinths may become really
tubular too, under the modifying influence of insect
selection. But at present the frequent recurrence of
white varieties — a probable reversion to some earlier type
— proves that our native plant is still far from having
completely adapted itself even to its present level of in-
sect fertilization. Thoroughly well-established and an-
cient species do not throw back so easily or so often to
less-advanced ancestral forms.

y.

THE TROUT JUMP.

POOR little May-flies on the pools of Yenlake, you
have at best but a hard life of it ! Though your wings
are fairy-like and light as gauze, though the sunshine
plays upon your dancing bodies with opalescent hues,
though you spend your time merrily enough to all seem-
ing in flitting and flirting by the cool rivulet, yet is your
appointed span but twenty-four hours long, and even for
that short space your courtship and your maternity is
environed with manifold dangers and endless foes. You
pass your days between the Scylla of sunshine and the
Charybdis of cloudy skies. "When the sun shone yester-
day, you were devoured in the midst of your love-mak-
ing by the gay swallows ; when the clouds cover the
heaven to-day, 1 see the trout are leaping to engulf you
as you try in vain to lay your eggs in peace and quiet on
the calm surface of the water. The fish can see you
quite enough against the background canopy of cloud,
and there is nothing they love better for their morning
meal than a good fat mother May-fly.

I wonder very much what thoughts pass through the
heads of these jumping trout as they gaze up eagerly tow-
ard the vast white sheet above them, just dappled here
and there by the little spot of darkness that forms to
them the visible symbol of an eatable insect. One of
the great dangers, indeed, which surround the path of
scientific psychology is that of being too exclusively
human. Here more than anywhere else in science the

THE TROUT JUMP. 31

old Greek doctrine that man is the measure of all
things seems especially to beset us on every side.
Our own consciousness being the only consciousness
which we can experimentally examine, we are pecul-
iarly liable to accept its component elements as being
the component elements of all other consciousness
whatsoever. It is very hard — some philosophers have
even told us it is impossible — to construct a comparative
psychology, as we can construct a comparative osteology
of a comparative philology. All the other minds about
which we can obtain even the second-hand information
given us by language are still human minds ; and for the
animal consciousness generally we are reduced to very
inferential and doubtful data.

Yet even here a good deal can be done by careful sift-
ing of facts, if only we know what facts to sift. The
general principle of nihil est in intellectu stands us in
good stead when once we have been able to discover
what was before in sensu • and this we can often do
provided we take the trouble to follow out all the hints
supplied us by the nervous system and by the habits or
peculiarities of animals. In some fishes, for instance,
there is every indication of the preponderance of smell
over sight as an intellectual and guiding sense. In the
sharks and rays the membrane of the nose is enormously
developed ; the olfactory nerve is by far the largest and
most important in the body ; the central organs directly
or indirectly connected with it form the main mass of
the brain ; and the indications of habit, as well as the
sniffing-muscles attached to the nostrils, all go to show
that smell is really the chief sense-endowment of these
predatory species. On the other hand, their eyes are
relatively small and poorly developed, their optic nerves
and lobes are unimportant, and the general indications

32 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

(about which it is only possible here to speak negatively)
do not lead one to suppose that sight is a sense of much
practical value to the sharks and rays. There are other
classes of fish, however, in which sight seems to play
a far more important part, and here it is perhaps
possible to institute some rough comparison as to rela-
tive perfection with the case of the human eye and
brain.

The class of fish in which the eye is apparently best
developed is that of the teleosteans, to which belong the
perch, salmon, cod, sole, turbot, and generally speaking
almost all the best-known and edible species, including
the trout of Yenlake. These fish are comparatively late
arrivals in our oceans and rivers, when we judge by a
geological standard ; but they have rapidly lived down
the great ganoids which preceded them, and have reduced
the shark family and the lampreys to a few predatory or
parasitic species. Externally and structurally they differ
in many particulars from all the other classes of fish,
which are now represented only by a relatively small
number of survivors ; but on the psychological side they
differ most conspicuously in this particular — that, while
the remaining ganoids, sharks, and lampreys all show
signs of depending mainly upon smell, their modern
superseders show signs of depending mainly upon sight.
The eye of these fishes is large and fairly developed ; the
optic nerves are big, and arranged in the same manner as
among the higher animals ; and the optic centres form
by far the largest portion of the brain. On the other
hand, the olfactory nerves and centres are small and
shrivelled. The indications of habit are certainly rather
inferential, yet they all point in the same direction aa
these structural facts.

Most common fish certainly find their food mainly by

THE TKOU'I JUMP. 33

means of sight. The careful way in which it is neces-
sary to imitate flies in order to deceive the wary trout
shows that they can pretty accurately distinguish forms
and colors. The rapidity and certainty with which other
fish will rise to an artificial minnow on a trolling-line
sufficiently proves the rapidity of their perceptions. The
imitative devices or mimicry which exist among many
species similarly prove how sharp are the eyes of their
enemies ; for these resemblances can only have been de-
veloped in order to deceive the senses of other fishes,
and would not, of course, go beyond the point at which
they proved useful to the species. All flatfish closely
imitate the colors and arrangement of the sand or peb-
bles on which they lie ; and it is often difficult even for
a human eye to detect a sole or a flounder in an aqua-
rium, although one may be perfectly sure that it is to be
found at the bottom of a particular tank. Some of
them have special pigment cells, like those of the chame-
leon, which they squeeze out in varying proportions till
they exactly resemble their surroundings ; and as this
action ceases when the fish is blind, it shows that the
protected fish themselves, as well as their enemies, are
conscious of minute differences in form and color. All
the animals which inhabit the sargasso weed are also col-
ored exactly like it, and so closely imitate it in many
ways that I have often narrowly examined a piece of the
weed freshly brought up in a bucket, and yet failed to
detect any sign of life till 1 lifted the spray from the
water and so compelled the hide-aways to reveal them-
selves. There is one pipe-fish, indeed, from the Austra-
lian coasts, which so exactly mimics the fucus in which
it lurks that nobody would believe it is a fish rather than
a branch of the weed round which it curls, until he has
dissected it. The necessity for such close resemblances

is the oest possible proof of acute sight in fishes exactly
analogous to our own.

That this faculty of vision includes a perception of
color as well as form is shown by the same facts ; but
there are other facts which seem to indicate it yet more
clearly. The teleosteans, which possess these developed
eyes and optic centres, are the only fish in which Mr.
Darwin has noted the occurrence of ornamental colors or
appendages, due, as he believes, to selective preferences
on the part of the animals themselves. It is curious,
too, that all the indirect proofs of color-sense in fishes
occur among this same group. The ornamental colors
generally coexist- with very excitable tempers, as is also
the case with such higher animals as the mandrill, the
peacock, and the humming-birds ; and in the little fight-
ing-fish kept as pets by the Siamese, the brilliant hues
are only displayed on the appearance of a rival or of the
fish's own reflection in a mirror. The moment the little
creature sees another of his own kind, he exhibits all his
coloring, and rushes against his enemy covered with
metallic tints, and waving his projected gills like the
wattles of a turkey-cock. Almost all the most beauti-
fully colored fish are coral feeders, dwelling among the
reefs and feeding off the bright polypes and other beauti-
ful creatures which abound in tropical seas.

This case is again quite paralleled by that of birds and
insects ; for the most gayly colored species, like the but-
terflies, rose-beetles, humming-birds, parrots, loris, and
toucans, are flower-feeders or fruit-eaters ; and we may
well suppose that in every case a taste for color has been
aroused in the creatures themselves during their constant
intercourse with brilliant surroundings and their con-
tinual quest for brilliant kinds of food. There seems to
be, in fact, a regular gradation of color-sense and color-

THE TROUT JUMP. 35

beauty in fishes, the most highly perceptive being them-
selves apparently the most ornamented. There is also a
similar gradation of general sight-faculties : from the
case of a tropical shore-fish which can thrust its mov-
able eyes out of their sockets, and which hunts crusta-
ceans out of water on mud-flats at ebb tide, or of an open-
sea fish which swims half above the surface, and has its
eyes divided horizontally into two portions, one adapted
for vision in air and the other in water — to the blind
fishes of the Mammoth Cave and of the marine abysses
revealed to us by the explorers in the Challenger. From
all these converging indications it is perhaps possible to
make a nearer guess at the visual faculties of fishes than
most people would be at first sight inclined to suspect.

VI.

CATKINS AND ALMOND-BLOSSOM.

IN spite of the renewal of winter weather, the trees
and flowers are still pushing on amain. Snow has fallen
again, but there has been a time of sunshine since ; and
though the air is keen, the leaves and bursting buds seem
to be drinking in the sunlight at all their pores. Ani-
mals have felt the brusque change more than plants. A
blackbird's nest had already two eggs in it a week ago,
but 1 fear the after frosts destroyed them. The early
lambs look woe- begone as they straggle aimlessly across
the damp fields, too cold to lie down and too tired to
keep themselves warm by frisking about ; and many of
the younger ones will suffer sorely. Farmers say, in
their matter-of-fact way, that the lambing will turn out
a failure ; and what a world of misery to the poor beasts
themselves those hard business words cover with their
cold phraseology. On the other hand, the plants and
trees for the most part seem none the worse for the
change. The wind has cut off the crocuses in a body,
but the lilacs are unfolding their leaves faster than ever,
the hedges are green in a mass on sheltered southern as-
pects, and the flowering almonds have their naked boughs
covered with clustering branches of delicate pinky-white
blossom, standing out in true Japanesque relief against
the bold background of the deep- blue sky.

They are hardly pretty, these flowering almonds and
other masses of spring bloom on leafless trees ; they
eadly lack the natural accompaniment of green foliage,

CATKINS AND ALMOND-BLOSSOM. 37

to which our eyes are so accustomed that the two together
form for us what Mr. Whistler would doubtless call a
native symphony in pink and green. Each individual
blossom is beautiful in itself — I mean in the graceful
and undistorted single almond ; for the double-flowering
monstrosity, with its simple natural symmetry lost in a
bunchy rosette of indistinguishable tags, is unlovely to
the botanical eye. Each single h've-petalled blossom is
beautiful in itself, I say ; and even a tall spray of them
deftly displayed in a vase against a contrasting back-
ground is effective enough, as those same cunning Japa-
nese artists long ago found out, with their usual quick eye
for color-harmonies ; but on the tree, growing all to-
gether, they have a certain bare and poverty-stricken
appearance as they cling tightly to their naked stems,
which always suggests the notion that they are pitiably
cold and want a few leaves to keep them warm. So,
bright and spring-like as they are, they cannot be con-
sidered exactly pretty — at least from a little distance, or
unless one stands close beneath the branches so as to
isolate a few sprays in bold relief against the retiring
sky.

This habit, in which so many spring plants and trees
indulge — the habit of sending up their flower-stalks or
opening their blossom before they put out any of their
leaves — is a curious and interesting one. It is, indeed,
far more common than casual observers would be in-
clined to imagine ; for the majority of spring-flowering
trees have their blossoms in those large yet inconspicuous
masses which we call catkins ; while others, like the
elms, have them in dense clusters, so closely seated on
the boughs that comparatively few passers-by notice
them. Almost all our larger native trees are catkin-
bearers — oaks, alders, birches, hazel, beech, sallow,

38 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

osier, poplar, and aspen ; but only a few of them hare
catkins which attract much attention, the silvery white
knobs of the willow family and a few others being the
only ones which most people pick in spring among the
woods. None of our own English trees has such a brill-
iant spring blossom as the flowering-almond, but among
southern plants similar masses of early bloom are not
uncommon.

Ill every case the reason for the flower preceding the
leaves seems to be the same. It is in principle a chapter
of natural economy, and it illustrates very well the way
in which all nature is necessarily compelled to piece in
with itself in every part. The catkin-bearing plants are
chiefly, if not always, wind-fertilized ; and they have
their stamens on one tree and their pistils on another,
thus insuring the highest possible degree of cross-fertili-
zation. They produce enormous quantities of pollen,
which they require, owing to the distance that often in-
tervenes between one tree and another, and the wasteful
nature of the wind as a carrier ; and this pollen falls
from them as a copious yellow powder when they are
placed in a vase on a table, while it can be shaken in
great quantities from the trees themselves. If the cat-
kins did not come out till the branches were all covered
with foliage, their chance of fertilization would be very
slight ; for the leaves would interfere with the passage
of the pollen. But by coining out in early spring, be-
fore the foliage has begun to burst its buds, and when
the winds are strongest, the catkins stand the best possi-
ble chance of fulfilling their special functions. A March
nor' -easter whistling through the naked boughs is almost
sure to carry a grain or two at least of the golden dust
from one tree to the other, and so enable the alders,
beeches, and hornbeams to set their seed in safety.

CATKINS AXD ALMOND-BLOSSOM. 39

With the crocuses and almonds the case is somewhat
different, yet alike in ultimate principle. These are
insect-fertilized flowers, and by flowering so early they
catch the bees in the beginning of spring. For, on the
one hand, the bees must have a succession of blossoms
all the year round (except in midwinter), or they could
never get on at all ; and the very existence of insect-fer-
tilized flowers as a body depends upon a tacit agreement
between them — so to speak — not to interfere with one
another, but to keep a continual supply for the bees and
butterflies from month to month ; while, on the other
hand, the flowers themselves need each a time when they
can depend upon receiving their fair share in the atten-
tions of the insects or else they might never set their
seeds at all. Some few of these early blossoms, like
crocuses and primroses, have leaves which can stand the
frosts of March ; but others, like the elm and almond,
have more delicate foliage, which consequently comes
out much later in the season. All these spring-flower-
ing plants lay by material somehow or other the sum-
mer before their next year's blossoms. The primrose
has its store of food-stuff in its thick and fleshy root-
stock ; the crocus and the autumn-saffron in their bulbs ;
the catkin-bearing trees, the elm and the almond, in
their inner bark and woody tissues. Trees, indeed, have
an immense advantage in their huge perennial trunks ;
for, before the foliage falls in autumn, they withdraw
all the useful material from the dying leaves, storing it
away in their permanent tissues ; and so almost all of
them are enabled to flower vigorously in spring before
any other plants, except the hoarders which possess
bulbs, have been able to anticipate them.

VII.

SPRING FLOWERS.

WALKING down the avenue the other day, I noticed
how the elms that line its sides and the flowering
almonds dotted about on the shrubbery were all in full
bloom long before the ordinary small plants could ven-
ture to peep out ; and I could not help observing that
this habit of early blossoming was closely dependent
upon the great size and perennial trunks of the larger
trees. They are enabled by means of their old wood to
store up in their permanent tissues the organized mate-
rial necessary for the production of flowers ; and so
they get a good start of all their less fortunate neighbors
and come in for the first attentions of the spring bees
and butterflies. To-day, however, out in the deep lane
which runs through Walcombe Vale, the similar efforts
of the smaller plants are forced upon my notice. There
are already some half-dozen flowers to be seen on the
high bank that bounds the lane or in the meadows on
either side ; and every one of these flowers has some
special device of its own which enables it to come out
thus early in the season, before many of its near allies
have begun to sprout from the swelling seed. It is a
general characteristic of all the first spring blossoms that
they appear either before their leaves, or else while the
leaves are still only half developed ; and of course such
a habit implies that material for their growth has already
been laid by elsewhere. For flowers are mere expenders
of food, not accumulators of food on their own account.

SPUING FLOWERS. 41

The leaves are the only part of the plant which can build
up fresh organized mutter ; and the matter composing
every flower has been sent to it by the leaves, either im-
mediately, as in most annuals, or through the storehouse
of a root, stem, or tuber, as in most perennials. A
hyacinth-bulb is a good^ and familiar instance of such a
storehouse.

Here, for example, among the shady greenery of the
bank I can gather numberless flowering heads of the
perennial mercury — a queer little three-cornered green
flower, with copious clusters of its tiny feathery blos-
soms hanging out upon long and graceful stalklets.
This mercury has a permanent creeping root-stock, in
which it lays by during the summer and autumn the
material needed for its next year's bloom ; and so it can
come out abundantly in the early spring before the shiny
green leaves are yet fully opened. On the other hand,
its very close ally, the annual mercury, grows afresh
from the seed every season, and therefore it has not
accumulated enough capital to begin flowering until the
late summer and autumn months. Yonder, again, on
the slope of the hill in the Fore Acre, I see a pale bunch
of primroses, their short stalks all tightly clinging to the
root-stock, in which the material for their growth has
been kept safely through the dangers of winter ; and if
you tear up the stock, you will see that it is large and
starchy, though it does not acutally form a tuber, as in
its near and more brilliant relative, the cyclamen. Fur-
ther on, the railway embankment is all yellow with the
tall gaunt-looking scapes and tufted flower-heads of the
coltsfoot, a yet more significant and interesting plant.
The coltsfoot is a sort of fluffy ragwort, which sends up
from its perennial starchy root a number of solitary,
stiff, straight, cottony stems at the first promise of

42 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

spring, each ending in a single golden head, out without
any foliage except some small brownish scales, much like
those of sprouting asparagus shoots. After the blossoms
are all over, the large woolly leaves begin to appear, and
occupy themselves during the summer in collecting
starch over again to fill the root for next spring's flower-
heads. At my feet, once more, I see a mass of bright
glossy heart-shaped leaves, interspersed with the brilliant
yellow blossoms of the smaller celandine — " gilt-cups"
the village children call them ; and the celandine also
enforces the same principle. It is one of the earliest
flowers to appear in spring ; while most of its congeners,
the crowfoots and buttercups, do not show themselves
till July or August ; and if you grub it up you will soon
see the reason why. The buttercups have simple thread-
like roots ; but the lesser celandine has a lot of roundish
mealy tubes, which it renews from year to year, and
which form the reserve-fund on which it draws for its
early blossoms. These habits of storing starchy food-
stuffs are to certain plants just what the analogous habits
of laying by honey, hoarding nuts, or gathering grain are
to the bee, the squirrel, and the harvesting ants, among
animals.

Turning from these little wayside blossoms to the large
and conspicuous spring flowers, such as the daffodil, the
narcissus, the snowdrop, the hyacinth, and the crocus,
one cannot help observing at once that they are all with-
out exception bulbous plants. Their large showy heads
of bloom require far more expenditure of raw material
than the tiny green flowers of the mercury, the thin
pellucid rays of the primrose, or even the bright golden
corolla of the lesser celandine. Moreover, if you look
closely at most of these bulbous blossoms, you will see
that they have very thick and fleshy petals, quite differ-

SPRING FLOWERS. 43

ent from the light papery petals of the wood anemone or
the violet. This fleshiness is very well exemplified in
the hyacinth, the tulip, and the tiger-lily — all of them
thick and stout blossoms, which flaunt their colors bold-
ly in the sunlight, and are little afraid of either wind
or rain. Throughout the whole of nature, 1 believe,
you will never find a brilliant mass of heavy bloom
on a strictly annual plant ; and all the more massive
forms are provided for beforehand by means of bulbs,
corms, or tubers. Such are the water-lilies, lotus, dah-
lias, orchids, iris, gladiolus, tuberose, arum, amaryllis,
fritillary, saffron, tulip, and almost all lilies. On the
other hand, whenever you find a single comparatively
inconspicuous plant among these families — as, for exam-
ple, Solomon's seal, with its small drooping greenish-
white blossoms — one is sure to find also that it is a bulb-
less annual.

Nearly all the other very conspicuous flowers are
shrubby or arboreal in habit, and so get their working
capital from the store laid up in the stem by last year's
leaves : as in the case of the cherry, apple, hawthorn,
pyrus japonica, lilac, rose, laburnum, and all the great
tropical flowering trees. Is one of these ever flower until
after many years of foliage ; and if the flower-buds are
nipped off when the trees are young and first begin to
bud, more food -stuffs are laid by to produce finer heads
of bloom in later years. In the case of these alders here
(which, however, being wind-fertilized, need make no
special display), we can actually see where the catkins
come from ; for they were formed last autumn, and have
hung on the trees unopened through the whole winter,
so as to catch the very first chance of sunshine in the be-
ginning of spring. So far as my observation goes, very
few annuals or other unaided plants ever have conspicu-

44 COLIK CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

ous flowers ; and those few generally produce their blos-
soms late in the season, after the leaves have had plenty
of time to make preparations for feeding them. Even
these rare exceptions are very deceptive and papery
flowers, like the poppies or the hand-to-mouth convolvu-
luses, which manage to make a great deal of show at
very little real expense. They spend all they have on a
little gaudy color, thinly spread over an extremely large
flat surface.

VIII.

RHUBARB SPROUTS.

THE beds of the kitchen garden at the present mo-
ment unintentionally afford an admirable illustration of
the main principle upon which most natural coloring
seems to depend. In their really beautiful display of
bright and gracefully graduated tints they supply us with
a picture which, but for its familiar utilitarian character,
everybody would stop to observe and admire. There
are long sticks of rhubarb, ruddy crimson below, and
merging through delicate gradations of pink and white
into the golden yellow of the cramped and etiolated
leaves above. There is sea-kale, blanched in the stem,
and unfolding at the blade into crinkled shoots of an in-
describable but very dainty pale mauve or violet. There
are beet-roots, sprouting with dark Tyrian-red leaves,
whose purplish veins persist even in the greening later
foliage. Almost every one of the spring plants has
more or less of these bright hues, marking them off at
once from the common green of full-blown summer
leaves. Even on the asparagus one may observe a set of
little bluish scales ; while the young tufts upon the
carrots are pale yellow or golden brown. The reason
throughout is a very simple one : all these spring vegeta-
bles are perennials grown from a permanent root-stock ;
and in some cases they have been more or less blanched,
naturally or artificially, by growing underneath a loose
mass of heaped-up earth. If one looks into the flower-
garden, one sees the same thing in the sprouting peonies,

46 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

whose rich red foliage is more likely, perhaps, to be
admired than the very similar leaves of the beet. All
these brilliant colors on spring plants are interesting be-
cause of the light which they incidentally cast upon the
origin of the equally brilliant and far more definite colors
of fruits and flowers.

Those who watch trees and bushes closely must have
noticed that the first buds in spring are usually more or
less red, or at least reddish or brownish. They must also
have noticed that in summer the ends of long growing
sprays are likewise ruddy, or purple, or warm brown.
Now, at first sight, these facts do not seem to have much
connection with another class of facts, such as those
noticed above, of which we may take as a typical example
the delicate blue or violet tinge on potato-stems allowed
to grow in a dark cellar. But when we come to look at
them closely, it is clear that they have all one character-
istic in common : they are leaves or leaf-stems which are
not performing their proper functions. All plants, of
whatever sort, when placed in full sunlight develop the
active green coloring matter in their leaves — the chlo-
rophyl which enables them to analyze carbonic acid in
the air, and to store its carbon as starch in their own sap
or tissues. When they are kept in the dark, however,
or when they are yet too young to have assumed their
proper office, they do not contain any of the green color-
ing matter, and so they look yellow, pink, or white.
The bright hue thus assumed by young or etiolated
leaves is due to the oxidation of their materials ; and, in
most cases where growth takes place from a stock of
food already laid by, such oxidation must necessarily go-
on. It is thus that we get the brilliant red, blue, and
yellow coloring of rhubarb, sea-kale, potato-sprouts,
beet-root leaves, growing peonies, or young carrots, as

RHUBARB SPROUTS. 47

well as of long sprays in hedgerows and on young rose-
bushes. As soon as the leaves are fully expanded, the
green chlorophyl begins to develop, and they rapidly
assume their true hue and their active life ; but if they
are kept in the dark, or prevented from normally de-
veloping, they go on retaining their original bright col-
ors for an indefinite period.

It seems most probable that in all cases the oxidation
of green leaves, stems, or other parts of plants, produces
bright red, yellow, and orange coloring matter. We are
all familiar with this fact in the instance of autumn
hues, where Mr. Sorby has shown that the pigment is
chemically nothing more than an oxidized form of the
ordinary chlorophyl. So it is in the case of both flowers
and fruits, which are purely expensive structures, pro-
duced for the most part from reservoirs of raw material,
such as bulbs, tubers, starchy root-stocks, or permanent
stems, and thus exactly resembling the red or purple
shoots of the peony, the rhubarb, the sea-kale, and the
hawthorn bushes. Every one knows that fruits are at
first green, and only grow colored as they ripen — that is
to say, as they oxidize. Mr. Sorby has shown that in
flowers, too, the coloring matter is at first green, and
exactly resembles that of ordinary leaves ; but as they
grow older they also get oxidized, and so assume their
bright hues.

In fact, the pigment of the petals in many cases is ex-
actly the same, both in color and in chemical composi-
tion, as that of the autumn leaves from which the chlo-
rophyl has disappeared, or of the young spring foliage
in which it has not yet been developed. So that, to put
it simply, all plants, whether they produce brilliant
fruits and flowers or otherwise, have in them all the
material necessary for such a display, and could be in-

48 COLIK CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

duced to assume bright hues under proper circumstances,
just as our gardeners have made the leaves of geraniums
and many other plants do so since the taste for colored
foliage plants set in. Besides, such bright hues are
especially apt to appear in the neighborhood of the fruits
or flowers, and do often appear there without any special
reason. If, then, in the wild state, they ever happened
to show themselves in such a manner as to benefit the
plant by attracting birds or insects, we may be pretty
sure that the tendency once set up would continue and
increase from generation to generation. As a matter of
fact, it is manifest that some familiar fruits and flowers
only show the tendency even now in a very nascent or
incipient form, while others show it in a highly de-
veloped degree. For example, in peaches and apples
only the sunny side is colored at all, and that in a very
irregular and patchy manner ; whereas oranges are fully
colored in every part. On the other hand, pears as a
rule hardly show any signs of coloring beyond a slight
browning of the peel on one side. Cherries give us
every stage — from the merely pink-cheeked whitehearts,
to the deep and uniform red of the morella. So, too,
among flowers, we may compare the almost accidental
pinkiness of the rays in a daisy with the full rich purple
of a cineraria. These intermediate cases help perhaps to
show us how color first begins to gather in some particu-
lar part, and so forms the groundwork upon which
selective action may gradually be exerted. It is not diffi-
cult to see how the first few faint streaks of red may be-
gin to dapple the cheek of a ripening fruit, just as they
dapple the surface of autumn leaves ; and yet when that
step has once been taken, it is easy to fancy the subse-
quent stages by which the color becomes intensified from
year to year, through the constant preference shown by

EHUBAKB SPROUTS, 49

the animal allies of the species for the most conspicuous
fruits. In the end, alike with berries and with blos-
soms, the coloring, which began by being accidental
and indefinite, finishes by being perfectly definite and
regular.

IX.

THE SWALLOWS AGAIN.

AT last the long-wished-for rain has come in earnest ;
the ground has drunk in water enough to give it more
than a mere surface wetting ; and the grass and leaves
begin to look themselves again after the long spell of dry
and warping weather. We had a few slight showers last
week, but they barely sufficed to lay the dust for a
couple of hours ; and as soon as they had dried up, the
east wind blew it about once more, so that even the
young green on the hedges and the horse-chestnuts was
smothered in a loose coat of grayish grime. Now, how-
ever, nature comes out anew after the downpour in its
freshest spring colors. The clouds still lower, and the
tops of the downs are still lost in slowly shifting mists ;
so to-day the swallows have left the open meadows and
are flitting low above the river, gaping open-mouthed at
the water-flies and skimming the surface of the stream
with their long blue-black wings. Leaning here on the
rough parapet of the old stone bridge, I can see the flies
at which they are darting just below me ; for swallows
are always fearless of man when on the wing, and do not
hesitate to approach him flying ; though they seem
hardly ever to alight anywhere within an easy stone's-
throw when he is by, except of course in their nests.
Their ceaseless motion and their curious independence of
rest strikingly recall the little humming-birds whom I
have often watched in like manner, whirring past me
from flower to flower in tropical gardens ; and, strange

THE SWALLOWS AGAIN. 51

i

as it sounds to say so, the swallows and the humming-
birds are indeed first cousins to one another, though so
very different in outward shape and plumage. Indeed,
nowhere else are appearances more deceitful. The hum-
ming-birds are not at all rekted to the sun-birds of India
and Africa, which are so like them as to be colloquially
called by their name ; while they are closely related to
the very unlike swallows, being, in fact, American swal-
lows which have never taken to migrating very far north,
and have accordingly adapted themselves instead to a
continuous tropical or sub-tropical existence.

Prince Lucien Bonaparte was the first to show that
the humming-birds were really most nearly allied to our
dingy northern swifts. Of all the swallow family, the
swifts are the most ceaselessly active and possess the
widest relative stretch of wing. Though a full-grown
bird usually weighs scarcely one ounce, it measures
eighteen inches from tip to tip of the pinions. No one
ever saw a swift perching on a tree or hopping about the
ground ; except when asleep, it is almost ceaselessly
upon the wing. It catches its food flying ; it drinks as
it skims the surface of the water ; it picks up the mate-
rials for its nest while sweeping among the meadows
close to the ground. Now, if you transfer some of these
active, restless, ^insect-catching swifts to the tropics,
what will be the natural result ? A large proportion of
tropical insects find their food in the large bells or deep
tubes of the brilliant equatorial flowers. So the swifts
would naturally take to flitting about in the neighbor-
hood of these blossoms and poising themselves on their
powerful wings just in front of their corollas. Those of
them which took permanently to such a mode of life
would soon adapt their external structure to the new
conditions with which they had grown familiar. Tropi-

52 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAK.

cal swifts with the longest bills and the most extensile
tongues would have an advantage over others, because
they would best be able to probe the long tubes of the
flowers and extract the insects from them, inside the nec-
tary itself. In this way the bill and tongue have grad-
ually grown so long in their descendants, the humming-
birds, that all outer resemblance to the parental swallow
form has been wholly lost ; and the family was, accord-
ingly, classed till quite recently with the externally simi-
lar, but genealogically quite distinct, group of sun-birds.

In most other respects, however, the humming-birds
continue to resemble the ancestral swifts. The shape of
the wing and its proportion to the body is exactly the
same ; but, above all, the numerous minute anatomical
points of similarity settle the question at once for modern
biology. Even before evolutionism gave the new key
which solves so many of these difficult problems, it was
noticed that the humming-birds were very like the swal-
lows in many anatomical particulars, though very unlike
them in plumage and in the shape of the bill. Dr. Jer-
don, who has spent his life in studying the birds of
India, hesitated about ranking the sun-birds by their side
because of this structural community between humming-
birds and swallows ; but he reassured himself when he
looked at the general external likeness of the two tropi-
cal groups. lSTow, however, we have learned that such
external likenesses are necessarily produced by commu-
nity of habit and mode of life ; while underlying struct-
ural resemblance forms the best test of genealogical
relationship. Mr. Wallace has shown conclusively that
the humming-birds are in reality modified swifts, and
that their resemblance to the Oriental sun-birds is wholly
due to the similarity of their circumstances.

In fact, the habits of the two races, though much alike

THE SWALLOWS AGAIN. 53

in many respects, still bear evident traces of their origi-
nal derivation. The sun-birds are by origin creepers ;
and, like other creepers, they have not very large or
powerful wings, and their feet are formed for perching,
which is not the case with either the swifts or the hum-
ming-birds. When a sun-bird wants to suck the honey
of a flower, it does not hover in front of it, poised upon
swiftly vibrating pinions, like its supposed American
allies ; but it perches first upon the stalk or branch, and
then extracts the nectar at its ease. The humming-
birds, on the other hand, being developed insect-eaters,
never alight, but catch their food upon the wing, just as
their ancestors the swifts were accustomed to do. More-
over, they are not to any great extent honey-suckers ;
what they seek in the nectary is not so much the honey
as the insects which have come to eat it. These they
can extract with their long tongues at a single flick, and
then they dart away again, just like the swallows, in
search of more. Mr. Wallace has shown that young
humming-birds starve upon honey, but live and thrive
upon insects alone ; being, in fact, as he puts it, still in
the swift stage of their development.

As for the points of convergence between the hum-
ming-birds and the sun-birds, those are easily enough
explained. Both races feed upon long-tubed tropical
flowers, probing their recesses in search either of honey
or flies ; and both, consequently, require long bills and
extensile tongues. Both races also possess brilliant
plumage, with metallic crests or gorgets ; and such brill-
iance is common among all flower - feeding and fruit-
eating species, such as butterflies, rose-beetles, toucans,
parrots, and birds of paradise. The constant association
with colored objects, and the constant search for them as
food, seems to arouse a taste for bright color in the creat-

64 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

ttres themselves, which is actively exerted in the choice of
mates. Why some members of the swift and swallow
family should have undergone this change to humming-
birds in the western continent and not in the eastern would
be a more difficult question to answer offhand ; but I
fancy the difference may be partly due to two causes.
In the first place, the peculiar way in which the Old
"World is cut up into two distinct regions, hot and cold,
by the Mediterranean and the Himalayan range may
have favored extensive migration here ; while in Am-
erica the continuity of land, the warmth of summer,
and the general luxuriance of blossoms permit humming-
birds to range as far north as Canada ; and thus one con-
tinent may have favored only the old open insect-hunt-
ing types like the swift, while the other favored also
specialized flower-hunting types like the humming-birds.
In the second place, the creepers may already have occu-
pied the field in the small portion of Africa and Asia
fitted for the evolution of such a race as the humming-
birds, and may thus effectually have prevented the east-
ern swifts from ever developing in that direction. Of
course in any case the specialization of humming-birds
in America must date back to a very remote period, both
on account of the profound modifications their form has
undergone, and on account of the immense number of
genera and species into which they have split up.

X.

THE GREEN LEAF.

WHAT an exquisite green, deeply tinged with yellow,
this young foliage of the oak shows us in these its earli-
est stages ! The first flush of the hedges was spoiled for
us this year, indeed, by the long mild weather of March ;
the hawthorn bushes came out too slowly and sporadi-
cally before their due season ever to display that living
outburst of fresh verdure in which they revel when a
week of bright sunshine comes in early April after pro-
tracted east winds, followed by a single quickening
shower or so, to plim out; and burst the swelling buds.
But the larger trees are making up for it now : their
leafing is favored by just such an interchange of sun and
shower as best suits their ingrained habits. The country
people use them to prognosticate the weather, with
scarcely more distinguished success than the Meteorolog-
ical Office itself. "When the oak's before the ash,"
runs our rustic jingle, " Then you may expect a
splash ; When the ash is before the oak, Then you may
look out for a soak." A priori considerations might
thus easily induce one to conclude that in England the
ash invariably preceded its great rival. But, as a matter
of fact, here as so often elsewhere, practice seems to
contradict theory — the oak oftenest leads the way.
Hence, considering the nature of our climate, the prov-
erb usually turns out wrong ; which, of course, makes
no difference at all in the faith reposed in it year after
year by some thirty millions of people in this kingdom.

56 COLIX CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

Instantia contradictories non movet. Once let a saw
take deep root in the rural mind, and no experience will
ever oust it. We have another local saying hereabouts,
that " Godshill plain is a sign of rain." Now, Godshill
stands on the very verge of the horizon, and is only
visible in very clear set-fair summer weather ; but week
after week in fine summers every inhabitant of the
village goes to bed nightly muttering to himself that it
will rain to-morrow because Godshill is seen so distinctly
this evening.

The yearly rejuvenescence of the trees in the fields
around us, though habit has somewhat dulled our ap-
preciation of its significance, is yet a very beautiful and
a very suggestive phenomenon. Strictly speaking, ac-
cording to the view adopted by our most philosophical
biologists, the leaf, not the plant, is the real individual
of the vegetable world ; and the tree as a whole is in
fact a great united colony of such separate individuals.
One may compare it to a coral-branch covered by thou-
sands of little living polypes, or to a sponge made up of
myriads of tiny jelly-like beings. Each leaf sprouts,
lives, and dies independently, without its death at all
affecting the general life of the community to which it
belongs ; and the seed that the tree as a whole sends
forth to perpetuate its kind is not so much a new indi-
vidual as the germ of a whole new colony. It resembles
rather a swarm of bees going forth to found a new hive
than a mere single young individual cast upon the world
on his own account. Yet the leaf differs from the coral
polype in one important particular : its life is carried on
in subordination to the life of the whole tree of which it
forms a part. Sap and protoplasm are supplied to it
from the older organs behind. It is like some member
of a civilized community whose own separate functions

THE GREEN LEAF. 57

are intimately bound up with those of all the others, on
whom he depends variously , for food and clothing ;
whereas the polype is like a mere hunting savage, self-
supporting and comparatively isolated, though forming
part of a rudely aggregated whole. And just as one
individual in the community may die without endanger-
ing the existence of the community in its corporate
capacity, so the separate leaves may fall away and die
without endangering or lessening the life of a tree on
which they grew. In this way they differ materially
from the organs of a single organism, no one of which
can be cut away without seriously damaging the entire
body of which it is a portion.

Metaphysical as this conception sounds at first hearing,
it would still be hard to realize in any other fashion the
actual life of trees. The green leaves which they are
now putting forth so abundantly are each new members
of the foliar commonwealth. They spring from buds,
prepared for the purpose before last winter set in ; and
they are nurtured by the material drawn from the dead
leaves of last year's crop ; for that is how the corporate
existence is kept up from season to season. What fell
last autumn was not the living part of the leaves ; it was
merely the dead skeleton of the foliage — the mass of
empty cells and stringy fibre, from which all truly vital
matter had been carefully withdrawn. The active pro-
toplasm and green chlorophyl from each cell of the leaf
moved slowly out with strange groping serpentine
motions, like little shapeless jelly-bag animals, at the
first approach of autumn frosts, and stored themselves
up securely in the permanent tissues of the stem till the
present time. How they have acquired the cunning to
do so, under the influence of natural selection, is one of
the greatest problems yet remaining unsolved in all the

58 COLI^ CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

history of life ; indeed, the more one looks at the ap-
parently spontaneous and voluntary movements of this
formless primary protoplasm, the more exactly do all its
properties, even in a plant, seem to resemble those of
conscious and intelligent beings. It is not merely that
protoplasm feels its way and moves responsively to
changes around it, but it also acts with every appearance
of deliberate volition. All winter long these living prin-
ciples of the dead leaves remain stored up within the
trunk or branches ; and now, when the sun returns to us
again, they are pushed up anew into the bursting buds,
and go to form the young leaves of the new year. The
vital protoplasm divides itself once more into cell after
cell in the fresh foliage ; each little globule surrounds
itself with a solid wall secreted from its own substance •
and the whole mass burgeons forth apace into a new set
of leaves.

Thus in one sense we might almost say that this year's
leaves are last year's over again. "Whatever was really
vital in them remains ; what was cast away was but the
bare shell that surrounded the true living material.
Trees, in fact, are plant communities which have learned
thus to keep up a common life apart from the life of the
separate individuals which make them up. Their stems
differ from the stems of herbs only in the thickness of
their cell-walls and the absence of living matter in the
woody tissues. Accordingly, trees appear in the most
widely different families of plants ; and sometimes they
are closely related to very small and weedy types, as
among the roses, which vary in stature from little creep-
ing herbs like the wild strawberry to tall trunks like the
pear-tree. Wide as the difference seems to us, it is but
a slight one in reality : a tree is only an herb which has
prospered best by growing stiff and perennial, and so

THE GREEN LEAF. 59

has acquired the habit of making its very stem very
stout and hard, to resist the greater mechanical strains
that will now be brought against it by wind and
weather. In all essential points each tree still preserves
all the main features of the family to which it happens
to belong.

XI.

THE FLOWERING OF THE GRASSES.

THE big dry logs beside the path in Holme Bush
Fields make a pleasant seat in wet weather ; though why
the Squire has let them lie here so long it would be
hard to say ; for they are fine solid trunks of good
timber, and now they are beginning to rot on the under-
side, and to put forth beautiful patches of bright orange
fungus at the scars of the main branches. Around them,
the grass is growing tall and luxuriant, as it always does
beside fallen wood ; and most of the heads are now
coming into their first bloom, with the little quivering
and shivering stamens trembling like aspen leaves before
the faintest breath of wind. These smooth, round cylin-
drical mops, soft and hairy like a fox's brush, are the
meadow foxtails ; these slender waving panicles, much
branched and subdivided, with a faint purplish blush upon
their tiny flowers, are the common field-grass, the most
ordinary element of all our English pastures ; these
larger, broader, flatter, and more turgid heads, fiercely
bearded, and standing out square to the breeze, are
haulms of brome ; and these single stiff, lance-like
spikes, with dark-brown scales between the florets, are
sweet vernal grass, the plant that, a little later, imparts
its familiar and delicious perfume to new-mown hay.
You can pick a dozen kinds without stirring as you sit
on the logs here. There are people who only know all
these infinite varieties that go to make up the greensward
of England as grass. But they are not grass, they are

THE FLOWERING OF THE GRASSES. 61

grasses. In Britain alone we have no fewer than a hun-
dred and one species, without counting some seventy
sedges which nobody but a botanist would ever think of
discriminating from them. They are all really as much
unlike one another, when you come to look into them,
as a wild strawberry is unlike a dog-rose ; yet even
countrymen and farmers make little distinction between
them, and not more than a dozen or so have real popular
English names — such as fescue, matweed, wild oats,
cordgrass, darnel, and wagging bennets. A few are
troublesome weeds, like couchgrass ; a few others are
valuable fodder, like timothy ; and these have naturally
acquired names from the cultivators who befriend or ex-
terminate them ; while a few more are striking enough
to attract attention by their prettiness, like quakegrass,
tares, or nard ; and these have sometimes been quaintly
and prettily dubbed with Bible names by village chil-
dren. But by far the greater number are too inconspic-
uous ever to have reached the dignity of any nomencla-
ture whatsoever till the systematists took them in hand
and divided them all artificially into different genera and
species. Even the larger groups number in Britain
forty-two.

Grasses have very degenerate flowers, almost more so
than those of any other known family of plants ; and yet
even here we can still dimly trace some vague picture of
their earlier pedigree in their present degraded condition.
It is a great mistake to suppose that evolution is neces-
sarily always upward. On the whole, there is continuous
progress ; but there is much retrogression, too, in particu-
lar cases. I take a head of meadow brome, and pull its
panicle to pieces. It is made up of several little flower-
ing branches, each covered with tiny green or brownish
flowers. Why green ? Because the grasses are wind-

62

fertilized and so have no need to attract insects ; on the
contrary, they do everything in their power to keep them
carefully away, for the flies would only eat the pollen
without doing any good to the plant in return. Now let
me take one little separate spikelet of flowers from the
head, and dissect it more carefully. Outside come two
empty pieces of chaff, mere bracts or scales, meant to
protect the flowers from intrusive ants or other creeping
insects. Then, within these protective shields come the
real flowers, each consisting of two somewhat similar bits
of chaff — glumes we call them — inclosing three waving
stamens and a tiny embryo grain. Not much like a lily
or wild hyacinth at first sight, and yet the self -same plan
is traceable all through them. The ancestors of the
grasses started by being a sort of lilies, each with three
calyx pieces, three petals, three stamens, and three cells
to their fruit ; what has become of all these parts in the
meadow brome ? Well, they are almost all there, if one
looks close enough to see them.

First there is the calyx : that is represented by the
two inner chaff-like glumes. Once upon a time there
were three of these, and there are still rudiments of the
three left ; for the innermost of the two glumes is really
a couple rolled into one, and has two little green midribs,
one on each side, as you see, still marking the true facts
as to its origin. In order to pack them away more neatly
on the branch, however, the one large outer calyx-piece
overwraps the two small and united inner ones, so that
to a casual glance they look like a pair of equal and op-
posite scales. That satisfactorily accounts for the calyx.

Next, how about the petals ? Well, if you lift off
the two glumes very carefully, you will see beneath them,
just outside the stamens and the embryo grain, a couple
of very tiny thin transparent leaves. They are almost

THE FLOWERING OF THE G.RASSES. 63

microscopical in size, no bigger than the dot of an i, and
so thin and filmy that they look very much like a midge's
wing. So far as I can tell they are of no use at all to
the plant as it now stands : they remain there as mere
functionless rudiments, apparently on purpose to let us
see the essential kinship between the grasses and the
lilies. For these are two out of the three original petals,
dwarfed almost beyond recognition, but still fairly to be
identified by means of intermediate links. As to the
third petal, which ought to be within, on the same side
as the two calyx-pieces which are united into one, that
has disappeared altogether., crushed wholly out of exist-
ence between the grain and the calyx. The fact is, the
one-sided arrangement of the little flowers on the spike,
necessary in order to let their stamens hang out freely
to the wind, has distorted all the inner half of the
blossoms — much as the habit of lying on one side has
distorted and blanched the lower half of the sole or the
flounder. But we have numerous intermediate forms
still existing which lead us from the true lilies, with
their colored petals, through the wood-rushes, whose
petals are thin and brownish, to certain sedges in which
they have become mere rudiments, and to the grasses in
which only two of them can be distinguished at all.
However, one group of very large and tall grasses, the
bamboo tribe, still keeps all three of its petals ; it is
the smallness of our English kinds which has made the
third and innermost disappear. The stamens are still
all right ; they keep up their original number of three ;
while in the fruit two of the cells have become abortive,
for a reason which we will presently consider, and only
one remains to produce a little corn -like grain. Our
spike of meadow-brome contains several dozen such
very tiny and degenerate lily blossoms.

64 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

But if the grasses are so degraded, why do they suc-
ceed in life so well ? One has only to cast an eye at the
fields around one to see that they have fared not badly
in the struggle for existence. In the first place we must
remember that in a natural state there are not, as a rule,
nearly so many grasses as we see about us in England.
Yirgin forest would naturally cover much of the land
which we have given over to meadow and pasture for
our own purposes ; and even where great prairies occupy
many miles together, they are by no means so exclu-
sively grassy as most people who have not seen them
are apt to imagine. Setting this aside, however, it must
be allowed that the grasses are really a very successful
family, one of the most successful on earth. But the
truth is, they owe their success to their very degeneracy.
The most highly developed types of plants or animals
are never by any means the most numerous. There are
more acorn barnacles on a single mile of tide-covered
rock than there are human beings in all the British Isles.
Who can count the number of little green aphides on a
solitary rose-leaf, or the number of mites in a single
pound of old cheese ? Yet all three classes are degene-
rate. It is just the same with plants : the small, lithe,
waving grasses can till up a thousand nooks and cornel's
in nature which cannot be filled by the great oaks, or
even by the tall docks, or spurges, or nettles. As a rule,
one may say that the higher plants are comparatively |
few and far between, while the small, degenerate types
are common and ubiquitous : just as one can everywhere
find little insects and creeping things, while deer, ele-
phants, zebras, and monkeys, both from their larger size
and higher specialization, are only found in small num-
bers over restricted areas.

But in their own way,' to fill their own place in

THE FLOWERING OF THE GRASSES. 65

nature, the grasses, though degenerate, are admirably
adapted to their particular station. The great secrets of
their success are probably three in number. First, they
have a general shape, which allows them admirably to
fill up all the cricks and corners between other plants —
to economize any bit of waste space which no other
competitor has seized upon ; and in perfectly wild or
tangled countries this is really their main function in
the complex balance of vegetable life. Secondly, they
have an immense number of flowers stowed away in the
smallest possible space, and fertilized in a very cheap
and simple manner by the wind. And thirdly, they
have learned to produce only one seed from each flower,
in the shape of a single grain, more richly stored with
food -stuffs for the young plant than those of almost any
other species. One rich seed is worth more in the
struggle for life than twenty poor ones. It is this last
peculiarity that makes the grasses so largely cultivated
by man. What feeds young plants will fed animals
also. We grow wheat, barley, oats, rye, Indian corn,
rice, and millet for our own use ; and we grow almost
all other kinds of grasses for our cattle and horses. Of
course, everybody knows that hay is cut just when these
rich seeds are at their prime, and it is comparatively
valueless if allowed to grow over-ripe so that the grain
falls out on to the ground below. Besides these main
points, however, grasses as a group have a hundred
minor adaptations, which give them special advantages
in the race for the possession of the earth ; and, as to
each particular grass, it has so many little tricks and
devices of its own, that if I were to try to tell you all
about the hairs and awns and bristles on this single bit
of brome or of foxtail, we might sit here talking all the
afternoon, and even then not have finished.

xn.

THE SUBMERGED FOEE8T.

LAST night's storm, coinciding with the spring tides,
has laid bare the beach for a considerable distance ; and
this morning, now that the ebb is at its lowest, the
stumps and twigs of the sunken forest may be clearly
seen protruding from the underlying clay bank. All
round the coast of England, wherever the land shelves
slowly off to seaward, we may find a curious belt of
such drowned woodland, partly uncovered at low tides,
and generally filled with broken stumps and trunks of
water-logged trees. These submerged forests are usually
well known locally by that very name ; but hardly
enough attention has yet been given to the practical
universality of their occurrence in all situations except
where the presence of high cliffs clearly indicates that
the land-line is being largely and rapidly undermined
by the encroaching sea. Such broken stumps and logs
are to be found, not here and there, but everywhere.
They begin under the level flats of Morecambe Bay and
the sands of Dee ; they crop up again in the great
bight of Cardigan Bay, where legend still commemorates
the flooding of the Lowland Hundred which once occu-
pied the space between the rocky barrier of Sarn Badrig
(or St. Patrick's Causeway) and the Merioneth coast ;
they are found once more along the entire line of the
Bristol Channel ; they fill up the hollows of Falmouth
Harbor, of Torbay, and of Dartmouth ; they recur here
at the embouchure of Yenlake ; they extend along the

THE SUBMERGED FOREST. 6?

whole Sussex shore ; and even on the east side of Eng-
land they have been traced in the estuary of the Thames,
at Cromer in Norfolk, in the Wash, and near the mouth
of the Humber.

In fact, the evidence goes to show that at no very
remote period the land of England stretched farther out
to sea in every direction than it does at the present day.
That most lively and amusing of mediaeval writers,
Giraldus Cambrensis — whose entertaining travels would,
I am sure, be much more read if his name did not sug-
gest incongruous notions of dry monastic chroniclers —
has given us a full and really scientific account of one
such submerged wood which he came across in South
Wales ; and ever since his time notices of these sub-
marine remains have frequently been published. Yet
no general explanation of their occurrence had been
attempted till within the last few years. Even now,
only a small number of scientific men have thoroughly
realized the wide range of the facts to be explained in
the case of the English coast.

The date of the submerged forests is, geologically
speaking, quite modern. The stumps are still woody in
texture, showing a bright pink hue when cut ; and they
would sometimes make very good timber if the softened
outer layer were once scraped off. Twigs, nuts, and
even leaves are often found almost unaltered in the
brown clay which surrounds the stumps. In the Bristol
Channel, which was long a broad open valley, like that
of the Thames or the Humber in our own time, caves
are still to be found in the cliffs which once overlooked
the wide plains ; and in these caves are numerous un-
fossilized bones of recent animals, devoured there by
bears and hyenas. In one such cave no fewer than a
thousand antlers of the reindeer were discovered. Such

38 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

facts can only be explained on the supposition that the
deer and oxen once roamed in the open valley beneath,
and were preyed on by the carnivores which haunted the
caverns. Every indication of the animals, the trees, and
the position of the deposits goes to show that this age
of forests extending far to seaward of the present coast
was subsequent to the date of the last glacial epoch, and
just preceded the final severance of England from the
Continent. In all probability the ancestors of the South
Welsh and of the small dark Celts of Scotland and
Ireland were already settled in Britain before that
severance took place.

The forest beds now stretch to a depth of some forty
or even sixty feet below the present highest tidal level.
Accordingly, the subsidence of the land appears to have
been at least as much as sixty feet, and perhaps far
more : for the trees must, of course, have flourished on
the level of high-water mark, and possibly a good deal
above it. Moreover, shore forms of shellfish are found
by dredging in similar old beds of recent but not of
modern date at considerable depths below the surface,
thus also showing a comparatively late subsidence of the
land. As these phenomena are not isolated, but occur
all round the coast of England, they probably mark a
general lowering of the land surface, rather than a mere
series of disconnected local changes. There are many
good reasons for supposing that England was still
united to the mainland of Europe after the ice of the
last glacial period had all melted away ; because our
fauna and flora are hardly at all peculiar, as is the case
with islands long separated from the neighboring con-
tinents. The animals and plants of Britain are the
animals and plants of Europe generally since the glacial
epoch ; and they do not include any of those which are

THE SUBMERGED FOREST. G#

peculiar to the pre-glacial age. They are so numerous
in species, and so fairly represent the fauna and flora of
the Continent, that they must have entered Britain from
the mainland by a broad ridge or isthmus at a period sub-
sequent to the great ice age ; and there is every reason
to believe that the earliest race, of men now inhabiting
the island also entered it at the same period.

Had not such a bridge existed later than the time
when the old fauna was killed off by the ice just as thor-
oughly as the temperate fauna of Greenland is killed
off in our own time, it would be impossible to account
for the presence of so many Continental animals, large
and small, as we actually find in Britain. A few deer
and a few rats might have swum over ; but that all our
shrews, foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, hares, rabbits, moles,
squirrels, weasels, stoats, martens, field-mice, lizards,
snakes, and other mammals or reptiles, could have come
across by mere accident is incredible. Still less can we
believe that our 120 species of snails and our numerous
insects were introduced in such a fortuitous way. The
straits which divide the Australian from the Javan and
Indian fauna are scarcely wider than the strait which
separates England from the Continent ; yet not one
Indian species of mammal has ever found its way into
Australia, nor one Australian species into the Javan and
Indian region. There can be little doubt, therefore, that
these submerged forests, almost modem in their appear-
ance and overlying the glacial gravels, are relics of the
land surface which once connected us with the Conti-
nent on the one hand and with Ireland on the other. If
it be asked why, with such a wide connection existing
at so late a date, we should lack so many Continental
mammals, the answer is that in a small and thickly
peopled area like England many of them have been

70

exterminated, directly or indirectly, through man's
agency, within the historical period. The bear, the
wild boar, the wolf, the reindeer, and the beaver have
all become extinct since the Roman occupation ; the
badger, the otter, the marten, and the stoat are being
slowly driven out in our own time ; the fallow deer and
the white cattle have been artificially preserved ; and
even the fox would perhaps have died out long ago but
for the strenuous exertions of sportsmen.

XIII.

A SUMMER TRIP.

How many Englishmen, I wonder, at a competitive ex-
amination, could tell one anything definite about Lundy
Island, whither we have come over to-day, like Mrs.
John Gil pin " on pleasure bent," with our baskets and
our bottles duly packed to enjoy a day's outing. A
boat from Clovelly has brought us across gayly enough
(in calm weather) ; and here we are, safe and sound,
prepared to explore the zoological and botanical pecu-
liarities of rugged little Lundj. There is an old story
of a Scotch minister in one of the little islets of the
Clyde mouth who once prayed for the wrelfare of Great
Cumbrae and Little Cumbrae, and the adjacent islands
of Great Britain and Ireland. The good man's simple
insularity recalls to one's mind a certain wider insularity
which we all of us share. "When most people speak of
the British Isles they probably have in their mind's eye
only the two main elements of Great Britain and Ireland,
without considering the " adjacent islands" at all ; and
even if they thought a little upon the subject they would
not be likely to reckon up more than some dozen others
of the largest sort — such as Wight, Man, Anglesey,
Orkney, Shetland, Skye. and Jura. But a geographical
authority credibly informs us that the British Isles really
comprise no fewer than one thousand separate islands
and islets, without counting mere jutting rocks or isolated
pinnacles. Of these, perhaps some two dozen are situ-
ated in the Bristol Channel, mostly off the jagged South

72 COLIN CLOFT'S CALENDAR.

Welsh coast*; while three of them — the Steep Holm, the
Flat Holm, and Lundy Island — may pretty fairly be
considered as belonging to the real English shore.

Their very names are interesting, for the Holms were
so called by the Scandinavian pirates and still retain the
old Norse word for an island, which we meet again, for
instance, in Stockholm, the isle at the debouchure of the
Malser Lake ; while Lundy shares the common termina-
tion of most other eyots round the English coast — as in
Sheppey, Walney, Anglesey, Scilly, and Caldy. The
syllable in question is the original English form
of the word island, which ought etymologically to be
written " iland ' ' ; and therefore Lundy ought to stand by
itself, as Sheppey and Anglesey always do, without
having a redundant and additional notification of its
insularity tacked on without rhyme or reason to its
name. But use and wont govern all these things ; and
just as people who are ignorant of the good old word
a mere" have taken to talking pleonastically of Winder-
mere Lake, so all of us have taken to talking pleonastic-
ally of Lundy Island. It is only in the bigger cases of
Sheppey, Jersey, and Anglesey that we still keep to the
correct usage ; much as we always properly say West-
moreland and Cumberland without any " shire," as we
ought to do, while the people of Rutland are often
scandalized at hearing their little county wrongfully
described as Rutlandshire.

Lundy is a small boss of granite with a little of the
red Devonian rock in patches on its surface, rising
somewhat abruptly from the bed of the Bristol Channel,
only twelve miles from the steep promontory of Hart-
land Point. It is not more than three miles long, and it
is little visited except by a few stray travellers from
Clovelly or Ilfracombe, who go over out of curiosity, 113

A SUMMER TJIIP. 73

order to say they have been to a place which hardly
anybody else has been to before. But from the point
of view of the geologist and naturalist Lundy and the
Holms are full of interest. For if, as seems probable,
the Bristol Channel was at no very remote period a
broad and open plain, like that of the Gironde, through
which the Severn made its way into the Atlantic some-
where off the south coast of Ireland, then these three
petty islands are solitary remains of the submerged
lands — little hills which have survived the general sub-
sidence, as Glastonbury Tor might survive if the water
were to break over the Somersetshire marshes, or as
Primrose Hill might survive if the valley of the Thames
were to sink some fifty feet below the sea.

We know that the warmth and the sea air have kept
a great many south European plants and animals alive
in the south-western peninsulas of England and Ireland
long after they have been killed out in the colder regions
of the north and east ; and in these little islets of the
south-west coast the insular conditions of heat, equable
temperature, and moisture prevail in the highest degree.
Everybody has heard of the sub tropical vegetation of
palms and aloes, which flourishes in the open air at
Tresco Abbey, in the Scilly Isles ; and all the insular or
peninsular portions of the shore exposed to the full flow
of the Gulf Stream are almost equally peculiar in the
southern character of their native flora. Thus in the
rocky clefts of the Steep Holm the deep red blossoms of
the true peony may still be seen profusely in May and
June, while it is found wild nowhere else in Europe
nearer than the Pyrenees ; and on Lundy the wild
asparagus covers the granite of the shore in many places,
though now almost extinct elsewhere in Great Britain,
save perhaps at Asparagus Island in Kynance Cove near

74 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

the Lizard, and some half-dozen other similar places.
It would be easy enough to make a long list of such
southern plants which still linger on in a few scattered
spots of Devonshire, Cornwall, and Kerry — relics of the
old flora of the submerged land between France, Spain,
and Ireland ; but perhaps a yet more interesting fact
about Lundy is the fact that it has in all probability
actually developed two new animals of its own.

Of course, the animals are not very large or very-
ferocious ; if they were there would not be much room
for them on Lundy. But an animal is an animal, what-
ever its size may be, arid the mere appearance of two
separate animals on the rocky boss of Lundy, and no-
where else in the world, is certainly in itself a sufficiently
surprising instance of local evolution. They are, in fact,
nothing more than two small beetles. It is, of course,
possible that these beetles may belong to the old fauna
of the Bristol Channel, just as some of the plants almost
certainly do, being found elsewhere on the Continent at
the present day. But, on the other hand, it is far more
probable, I think, that they are true natives of Lundy,
sons of the soil developed on the spot ; for it is well
known that species are particularly apt to vary on
islands, and the more so the smaller their area and the
more peculiar their climate. The intervening sea prevents
free reinforcement of the original breed from the main-
land ; and so new varieties adapted to the special
circumstances soon establish themselves, and before long
grow into distinct species. Even in so large an island
as Great Britain itself, but recently separated from the
Continent, we have already one peculiar native bird — the
Scotch grouse, which, as everybody knows, is not found
anywhere else in the world ; while we have several
native butterflies, as well as dozens and dozens of in-

A SUMMER TRIP. 75

cipient varieties, which may possibly establish them-
selves as species in the course of time. But in our
smaller outlying islands, with their equable temperature
and very insular character, including generally the
absence of many common enemies — such as birds of
prey, foxes, weasels, and so forth — numbers of separate
local s'pecies have been noted by Mr. Wallace and other
investigators. Thus, Shetland and the Isle of Wight
have each a peculiar beetle of their own ; Man has a
dwarf butterfly and a tailless cat ; Guernsey has a caddis-
ily all to itself ; and the Kerry Mountains (almost insular
in climate and abounding in peculiar plants of southern
type) have a water-snail. Almost every little island has
also numerous local varieties. These cases are quite
different from that of the Steep Holm peony, which is
merely a flower belonging to the great chain from the
Caucasus to the Pyrenees, reappearing in an isolated
spot in Britain ; whereas the peculiar island animals are
confined to these small areas, on which therefore they
have presumably been developed. Furthermore, lakes
are to the world of water what islands are to the world
of land ; and Dr. Giinther has shown that almost every
mountain tarn in Scotland, Ireland, and the Orkneys has
its own peculiar species of trout or charr. Putting all
these things together, then, it seems very probable that
the two Lundy beetles have really been developed on
the island itself from ancestral forms similar to those of
England, but specially selected under the particular
circumstances of the locality in which their lot was cast.
If all the outlying eyots of Kerry, Connemara, and the
Hebrides were equally well searched, it is extremely
likely that dozens more and similar cases of insular
species would be discovered without much difficulty.

XIV.

THE CLOVER BLOOMS.

IT is dry enough to-day to sit on the edge of the bank
here, overlooking the sea, and watch the stone-boats
loading great nodules of blue lias from the cliff to send
away for cement in the two big clumsy coasting- vessels
that ride awkwardly at anchor among the few small
trawlers alongside our tiny quay. This long mound-
shaped hillock on whose side I am seated bears among
the children the fanciful name of the Giant's Grave ; and,
indeed, at first sight you might easily take it for a huge
artificial barrow of the oldest prehistoric type. It is in
reality, however, a natural formation after all — an oblong
mass of loose rubbly chert tumbled from the cliff above
in winter weather, and long ago worn down by frost and
rain to a round, smooth, level contour. Among the
close-bitten turf on its shallow surface-soil, a little strag-
gling and creeping white clover seems to form the chief
element. 1 have known it well for years on this self-
same knoll ; for it has a wonderful knack of clinging to
any spot where it has once established itself ; which is
not by any means surprising when one comes to learn its
peculiar economy. It is a special form of clover adapted
to dry sandy or gravelly pastures, but above all to shal-
low sheep-cropped sward like that of the knap here ;
and it has learned in a marvellous fashion how to pro-
tect itself against all the dangers to which the life of a
fodder-plant is exposed in such difficult haunts.

The clovers as a group, indeed, are well worth an

THE CLOVER BLOOMS. 77

hour's study ; and this particular clover is certainly one
of the most interesting among them. I suppose it will
sound like a paradox to say that these little creeping
herbs rank as the most developed of all the pea-flower
tribe ; especially when one considers the tall tree-like
laburnums, acacias, and locusts of our shrubberies, or
the great stout-stemmed climbing wistaria on our garden-
walls ; yet such is the fact. The clovers have undergone
a greater amount of modification to suit their special
habits than any other species among them all. They
are distinctly bee-flowers to a very high degree. Look
at that big blustering humble-bee down on the level
there : he is out this morning on a special hunt after
clover-honey ; for bees, like prudent human beings, never
mix their nectars ; they stick to one kind of flower at a
time, and probably (though this is not yet certain) store
each cell with a single sort of honey only. It is that
which gives the higher insects their value as fertilizers :
if they went about indiscriminately from one kind of
flower to another they would do no good at all, or else
would only produce monstrous and infertile hybrids.
There are many volatile insects that flit about in this
unconscious way from species to species ; and those are
the unwelcome visitors against which our flowers fortify
themselves with all sorts of hairs, prickles, bristles, and
scales. But now, on the other hand, just watch the
humble-bee over there. He goes soberly about in the
most business-like manner from head to head of the red
clover only, taking no notice at all of the creamy Dutch
clover that grows in and out among it, nor of this little
creeping variety that covers the surface of the hummock
here. For a moment now he sniffs suspiciously at an-
other red flower among the grass, much like his favorite
for the day in tone of color ; but it turns out to be only

78 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

a vetcli ; and lie sails away with an obvious air of dis-
gust, like one distracted from pressing business for a
wliile by a bit of idle inquiry. Now he is buried deep
in another head of red clover, sucking the honey quickly
from each ripe purple floret, one after another, and
passing by the over-ripe ones at once, without even a
glance, like an experienced workman that he is.

Indeed, this particular English red clover is so wholly
specialized to suit our own humble-bees that it cannot
set its seed without them. The proboscis of the hive-bee
is not long enough to reach the honey. In New Zealand,
for many years it has been necessary to import clover-
seed for each crop from England, because there were no
humble-bees in the colony ; and so seriously has the
want of these useful fertilizers been felt that several
attempts have been made, not very successfully as yet,
to acclimatize them in the islands. That is perhaps one
of the most remarkable practical applications of what
seems at first sight purely otiose scientific knowledge
that has ever yet been made. I think it is Professor
Huxley who quaintly remarks somewhere that the fer-
tility of the clover in any district ultimately depends in
part upon the number of old maids. For the clover is
fertilized by the bees ; but the bees, again, are greatly
thinned by harvest-mice ; and the harvest-mice in turn
are much devoured by cats ; and the cats, finally, are
chiefly kept by old maids. The more cats, therefore,
the fewer the harvest-mice, and the fewer harvest-mice
the more bees. Omitting the old maids as perhaps too
curious an addition to the series, the chain of causes and
effects well illustrates the infinite and infinitesimal inter-
action, the constant cycle of relations, obtaining between
every part of the organic world.

I pick a head of red clover and a stalk of this creep-

THE CLOVER BLOOMS. 79

ing white kind, to look into them a little more closely.
First, let us begin upon the more normal red form. It
is made up of some thirty or forty tiny purplish pea-
flowers, each with a little red hairy calyx of its own ;
the whole set of hairs mingling together below so as to
form a perfect miniature forest, through which no thiev-
ing ant can possibly force his way to the honey store.
Nothing bothers ants like hairs ; and Sir John Lubbock
found that they could not climb up on to a table or safe
if only a little fur was gummed around its legs. But
though the florets of the clover are essentially pea-flowers,
they are not pea- flowers of the common and ordinary
type. They do not consist, like the blossoms of the
garden-pea or the laburnum, of four distinct and separate
petals : all their parts have grown together at the base by
the claws, so as to form a single deep and narrow tube.
That makes them such favorites with the bees ; while,
conversely, it is the constant selective action of the bees
which has enabled them to assume this specialized form.
The most tubular blossoms are those the bee always
chooses by preference ; and when the tube is so deep
and narrow as it is in red clover, the bee knows that no
other insect can reach the nectar but himself, and so
feels sure of obtaining a guaranteed drop of honey as the
reward for his services. At the same time, as the
stamens have also coalesced with the petal tube, he can-
not fail to fertilize the head while helping himself to the
honey. This makes red clover a very successful plant,
as you can easily see by looking about you in the fields
anywhere. It also makes it good fodder ; for as each
flower has a pod with only one big bean or seed inside
it, the whole head contains a large number of beans,
rich in starches and gluten as foodstuffs. It is always the
seeds that are the most useful for food ; not the mere

80 COLIN- CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

hard, stringy leaves and stalks. Everybody knows the
difference in effect between a feed of oats and a feed of
straw. Pulse, indeed, forms the most valuable set of
fodder plants and human foodstuffs in the world, except
only the grasses ; because the seeds are almost always
large and well supplied with albumen. Cows will turn
aside from any grass to red clover. Observe, too, that
these clover blossoms, like most other highly specialized
bee-flowers, are purple. The common small pea-blos-
soms, such as nonsuch, lotus, kidney-vetch, and medick,
are all yellow ; and so are even gorse and broom. Some
of the smaller and simpler clovers, too, still retain this
aboriginal yellow hue ; but the better kinds, which have
advanced further in specialization for bees, preserve for
us the various upward stages of white, cream-color, pink,
red, and scarlet, till at last we reach the highest level in
these purple heads — the highest level, that is to say, yet
attained by a clover ; for no species of the genus has so
far acquired the most peculiar bee-tint of all, which is
dark blue or ultramarine, as seen in the violet or the
bugloss.

And now let us look at the little white straggling
kind of clover which grows all over the shallow grass
of the knoll here. In shape, its florets are just the same
long tubular blossoms as those of the purple clover ; but
there are only two or three of them on each head, instead
of forty or fifty. See how well adapted they are, how-
ever, to their habitat. The stems and leaves and buds
creep prostrate along the ground, so as to get as much
as possible out of the way of the close-biting sheep ;
but the flowers turn up straight just at the moment of
blossoming, so as to catch the attention of the passing
bee. Both kinds are sweet-scented, like most bee-
flowers, and with a very suggestive savor of honey in

THE CLOVER BLOOMS. 81

their scent too. As soon as the white kind has been fer-
tilized, however, it turns down its head toward the
ground, so as to save the swelling pods from the hungry
sheep. At the same time the stem lengthens, and a
very curious change begins to take place in the head. If
you look close into the flowering branches, you will see
a small green knob in the centre, between the three
florets. This knob really consists of the other undevel-
oped blossoms which once formed the head, for it ought
by descent to have at least ten or twelve instead of three.
After the pods begin to set, and the stem to turn down-
ward, these undeveloped blossoms grow out into short
thick fibres, each five-fingered at the tip, as a reminis-
cence of the five lobes which once went to make up the
original calyx. As the stem lengthens, the fingers push
their way slowly into the loose earth with a screw-like
action, and at last make a hole for the three pods, which
have already turned back on their stalks, so as to offer as
little resistance as possible to the soil. Thus the plant
actually buries its own seeds out of the way of all depre-
dators ; and there they ripen and lie securely till next
spring's rain quickens them afresh. In this way alone
could the subterranean clover — for that is its name — sur-
vive with safety in its shallow closely cropped pasture
grounds. Yet how wonderful the action of natural
selection here makes the plant simulate intelligence and
volition. More than half the flowers have been altered
into barren fibres to act as picks or augers in the earth ;
and the stem has acquired the habit of turning up, and
then turning down : all for the sake of burying the three
remaining fertile blossoms in the soil, and securing the
safety of their few seeds. Indeed, it is often easiest to
formulate the whole series of changes to oneself in such
terms as one would naturally apply to a conscious and

82 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

self-governing living creature ; and it is this that adds
such a charm to the new conception of nature which has
been opened before the naturalists of the present genera-
tion. We need no longer think of the plants as things
that were made once for all ; we may think of them as
things that grew and improved and almost invented ; and
that idea immensely deepens the interest with which we
can watch all their innocent ways and curious half-
reasoning ingenious devices.

XV.

EARLY SEEDTIME.

IT is wonderful to see how quickly the first spring
plants manage to set and ripen their stock of seeds.
Already one hasty crop has been duly shed, and now in
this genial May weather the second detachment of early
perennials is beginning to scatter its ripe fruit broadcast
over the basking fields. Stage after stage, in regular
succession, they follow one another like waves on the
sea, each filling up a little special corner in the rural cal-
endar, and each monopolizing for the time some one or
other of the active external agencies by whose aid vege-
table life is necessarily carried on. Even now the three
sets of buttercups are seen here on the farm in three
stages side by side ; the lesser celandine, earliest of the
group, has blossomed long ago, and is now letting its
ripe capsules fall one by one from the globular heads ;
the bulbous buttercup, next in order of time, still shows a
few open flowers here and there, but most of them have
dropped their petals, and have the green capsules just
swelling with the young seeds ; finally, the tall meadow
buttercups and the creeping species, latest of the com-
mon kinds, are only now for the first time opening their
golden buds. But the most conspicuous seeds of all in
the Fore Acre just at present are the dandelion clocks ;
and it is pleasant to sit in the sun and watch the wind
taking off one little feathery parachute after another
from the head, till the smooth round disk is left at last
bald and naked. If we were not so accustomed to dan-

84 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR,

delion clocks from our babyhood upward, they would
certainly strike us as being very curious and interesting
objects indeed.

If you pull a blossoming head of dandelion to pieces,
you see at once that it is not a single flower, as it appears
at first sight, but a whole collection of tiny separate
florets crowded together in a bunch on a circular disk or
cushion. Each floret stands complete in itself, with a
tubular yellow corolla, a set of wee slender stamens j and
a delicate two-lobed pistil in the centre, both lobes being
curled round gracefully like a ram's horn. It has its own
fruit, too : a small white object at the bottom, looking
exactly like a single seed, as it practically is. In the
daisy you get something of the same arrangement ; only
there the yellow florets of the central part are bell-
shaped, like miniature hyacinths or heath-blossoms, and
only the pink-tipped outer rays are split down one side
so as to make their corolla more like a strap than a cup
or bell. In the dandelion, on the other hand, the same
tendency has gone a little farther, and all the florets in
the head have become strap-shaped rays, so as to let vari-
ous small insects get easily at the drop of honey which
each floret secretes in the nectary at its base. The daisy
is a comparatively exclusive plant, which lays itself out
mainly for distinguished visitors ; the dandelion is a
sort of common innkeeper, which welcomes all comers
equally without regard to rank or station. So we see the
tastes of their different clients reflected in their own
colors. The daisy has evolved white rays with pink tips
to satisfy the eyes of a more aesthetically exacting circle ;
the dandelion retains the primitive yellow corolla of its
kind, the hue that best suits the requirements of mis-
cellaneous small flies and petty honey-seeking beetles.
Each in its own way has proved very successful ; for do

EARLY SEEDTIME. 85

not daisies and dandelions grow everywhere ? But on
the whole, as usually happens, the higher type is the
most successful of the two. Both largely owe their ad-
vancement in life to their serried rows of flowers, which
allow the bee or butterfly to pass from one floret to
another with ease, and to fertilize many blossoms at once
for a very small return in the way of honey.

All this, however, has very little to do with the dan-
delion clock, though it is necessary by way of prelimi-
nary to the consideration of those fluffy balls. The clock
consists of the rest of the florets after the corolla has
fallen off. The lower part, of course, is the seed, or
rather the fruit ; but what is the upper part, the little
parachute of white silky hairs ? "Well, this curious ap-
pendage represents one of the most singular and instruc-
tive transformations in all nature. Pull out one of the
blossoming florets from the yellow dandelion-head, and
you will see it is surrounded by a circular group of small
hairs. These hairs are all that remains of the original
calyx, which had for its function the protection of the
flower from intrusive insects. But when the dwarfed
and clustered blossoms of the original ancestor from
whom both daisy and dandelion are descended grew into
a single compact head, the use of the separate calyx was
practically gone, and its place a number of bracts were
produced as an involucre around the entire head, sub-
serving the same function for the compound blossom as
the calyx once subserved for each of its component
members.

Under such circumstances, one of two things must
needs happen : either the calyx must become obsolete
through disuse or must be preserved by adapting itself
to a new function. In the daisy, the first result has
come about ; in 'the dandelion, the second. The calyx

86

here has grown small and hair-like, and acts as a sail or
wing for the light little fruit. Thus the wind catches
the seeds when ripe and carries them away to every part
of the field. In the simpler plants of the dandelion kind
there are only a few of these silky hairs seated perpen-
dicularly on the summit of the fruit, and the subsidiary
devices for dispersion are far less perfect. But in the
dandelion itself, which is a very highly adapted type —
all these common weeds always are, and that is what
makes them so common — the top of the fruit grows out
into a long beak, on which the hairs spread laterally in a
circle, so as to present the largest possibly surface to the
favoring breeze. Even in the dandelion, however, the
hairs themselves are straight and simple ; in its near rela-
tive, John-go-to-bed-at-noon, the hairs are much longer,
and are subdivided into feathery branches on either side,
which make an interlacing parachute even better adapted
for driving before the wind than that of its more familiar
kinsmen.

The reason why plants take all this trouble to get their
seeds dispersed is a simple one, and yet it might not
immediately strike everybody. Why should they not let
them drop out upon the ground just underneath their own
branches ? For the very same reason that the farmer
does not crop the same land with corn or turnips ten
years running. The plants had unconsciously discovered
rotation of crops ages before the agriculturists conscious-
ly hit upon it. A weed cannot grow over and over
again in the same place, any more than flax or horse-
beans ; it soon uses up the soil, which must then lie fal-
low a little, or else bear some less exhausting plant — that
is to say, some plant that does not drain it of the same
materials as its last occupant. Hence those wild things
which happened to show any tendency toward dispersive

EARLY SEEDTIME. 87

»

devices have outrun all others in the struggle for exist-
ence ; indeed, dispersion in some form or other has
become an absolute necessity for every kind of plant in
a state of nature. Some of them manage it by produc-
ing tubers side by side with the decayed ones, like the
orchids ; others send out runners or suckers like the
strawberry and the creeping buttercup ; yet others
sprout afresh here and there from underground stocks or
reserve stores, like coltsfoot or potatoes. But by far the
greater number manage to get their seeds scattered for
them either by the wind or by means of animals ; for
these two main motor powers of the environment are
always utilized for every purpose by plants, whose own
powers of locomotion are so very feeble. Sometimes
the seeds stick, like burrs and cleavers, to the wool of
sheep or the hair of animals, and are nibbed off at last
against a hedge or a post, at a distance from the mother-
plant. Sometimes they are swallowed whole but not
digested, as in the strawberry, raspberry, and cherry.
Sometimes they are carried before the wind by expanded
wings, as in the maple, the sycamore, and the ash.
Sometimes they are borne up by light hairs or down, as
in the willow, the cotton, and the dandelion. Occasion-
ally even the plant itself supplies the necessary energy ;
and of this the small green bittercress growing on the
wall by Yenlake affords at the present moment an excel-
lent example. Bittercress has long, straight, upright
pods, like charlock or cabbage, and it thrives for the
most part on dry banks or high open places. When the
seeds are ripe the sides of the pod unroll elastically, by
the unequal drying of their stringy tibres ; and as they
do so they shoot out the 'little seeds like popguns, and
scatter them to a distance of six or seven feet ; as one can
easily see by picking an unripe spray and spreading a

88 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

«

newspaper on the floor around it when it ripens. Chil-
dren well know this habit of bittercress, and will press
their lingers on the tip of the dry capsules to make
them explode ; if they are fully ripe they go off at once
with a little bang. Garden balsams do much the same
thing a little later in the season. Indeed, there is no
plant which does not possess some special plan or other
to secure fresh fields and pastures new from time to
time ; and to trace these out is another of the pleasures
that we countrymen derive from following the epochs of
our rustic calendar. Every day brings its manifold
changes, and almost all go unsung carent quid vate
sacro. The little that one man can put on record is but
a tithe or a hundredth part of the infinite variety they
display.

XVI.

A SQUIRREL'S NEST.

I HAD long known there must be a squirrel's nest in
the big tree at the corner of the avenue, for I have often
remarked split shells of hazel-nuts lying about loosely at
its roots ; and nut-shells split in such a fashion always
indicate the presence of a squirrel. There are three
creatures in England that largely feed upon filberts — the
squirrel, the field-mouse, and the nuthatch ; and when
you find an empty nut you can easily tell which of the
three has been at it by the way they each adopt in get-
ting out the kernel. The squirrel holds the nut firmly
between his fore-paws, rasps off the sharp end by gnaw-
ing it across, and then splits the soft fresh shell down
longitudinally with his long front teeth, exactly in the
same way as a ploughboy splits it with a side-jerk of his
jack-knife. The field-mouse presses the nut against the
ground with his feet, and drills a very small hole in it
with his sharp incisors, through which, by turning the
shell round and round in his paws, he picks out the ker-
nel piecemeal. The nuthatch, having no paws to spare,
fixes the filbert in the fork of a small branch or the
chink of a post, and pecks an irregular breach in it with
his hard beak ; the breach being easily distinguishable
from the neat workmanlike round gimlet-hole made by
the field-mouse. But although I knew the squirrel was
there by circumstantial evidence, I had never seen him
till after the great storm tore up the tree, roots and all,
and strewed it, a huge ruin, right across the face of the

90 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

park close by the gate-house. Even then he did not at
once desert his home, before the laborers began hacking
off the branches ; when he quietly betook himself with
his family to a neighboring oak, whither he has since
transferred by night the scanty remainder of his spring
hoard.

The relics of the hoard are still to be seen in the aban-
doned hole, a deep recess where a gnarled bough had
made a natural scar, improved upon with careful art by
many generations of squirrels. There are acorn-skins,
split shells of cob-nuts, beech-mast, and other mouldering
spoils in plenty — the ancestral shards of many a winter
feast. Indeed, it is curious how the trees and the ani-
mals have managed in this matter so cleverly to outwit
each other in the see-saw of continuous adaptation. For
the nuts have acquired their hard shells to get the better
of the squirrels ; and the squirrels have acquired their
long pointed teeth to get the better of the nut-shells.
Yet even at the present day, when the balance of victory
apparently inclines for the moment to the side of the
squirrel, the trees are not without their occasional re-
venge, since some nuts either prove too hard for the dep-
redators or are forgotten in the abundance of supplies ;
and so it has happened that, in certain recorded cases, the
existence of young seedlings in wild places has been
demonstrably traced to an abandoned hoard, which has
afforded a good supply of rich manure to the germinat-
ing embryos.

It is odd, too, how general among the rodents is this
instinct of laying by supplies for the winter, due, no
doubt, in part to the exceptionally imperishable nature of
their chief foodstuffs (for nuts, grains, and roots do not
decay quickly, like fruits or meat), and in part to the
usual close similarity in their surroundings and mode of

A SQUIRREL'S NEST. 91

life. We can hardly regard it as a habit derived from a
single common ancestor, because it appears so sporadi-
cally, and so many related species are wholly wanting in
it. Most probably it has been independently evolved in
the squirrel, the harvest-mouse, the rat, the field-mouse,
and the beaver, from the fact that in each group alike
those who manifested it most would always best survive
through the chilly and foodless northern winters. On
the other hand, the storing instinct is sometimes replaced
among allied animals by other instincts almost equally
remarkable : as in the case of the dormouse, who gets
over the same difiiculty by fattening himself inordinately
during the summer, and then sleeping away the winter
so as only to use up the irreducible minimum of food-
stuffs in the absolutely indispensable vital actions of the
heart and lungs. From the point of view of mere sur-
vival, it would matter little whether any particular
group happened to fall into the one practice or the
other. It is very noticeable, however, that while the
sleepiness of the dormouse has fostered, or at least has
not militated against, a stupidity as great as that of the
guinea-pig or the tame rabbit, the more active and prov-
ident habits of the squirrel and the beaver have fostered
an amount of intelligence extremely rare among rodents,
or, indeed, among animals generally. I once kept a
tame squirrel for some months, not in a wretched little
tread-mill cage, but loose in my rooms ; and in affection-
ateness of demeanor, as well as in general cleverness of
perceptions, it certainly surpassed a good many dogs that
I have known. Doubtless the habit of storing food grew
up at first, as the west-country proverb says, more by
hap than cunning. It may have originated merely from
the thoughtlessly greedy practice of carrying home more
food at a time than was needed for immediate consump-

92 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

tion. Still, though the custom need not have been de-
liberately intelligent in its origin, it must have tended to
develop intelligence in the animals displaying it ; and
even now it has hardened into an inherited instinct, it
may often be a very conscious bit of prevision indeed
with old squirrels who have seen more than one winter,
and who know that nuts or berries cannot always be ob-
tained with equal ease. At any rate, the fact that squir-
rels, rats, and beavers are now very clever animals is un-
deniable ; and there is every reason to believe that their
cleverness has been partly brought out by their provident
habits.

Another thing that probably adds to the physical
basis of intelligence in squirrels is their possession of a
pair of paws which almost serve them in the place of
hands. Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out that many
of the cleverest animals are those which can grasp an
object all round with some prehensile organ. Such ani-
mals, in fact, are the only ones that can really quite un-
derstand the nature of space of three dimensions. The
apes and monkeys with their opposable thumb, the ele-
phants with their flexible trunk and its finger-like process,
the parrots with their prehensile claws, are all instances
strictly in point. Even among the usually stupid marsu-
pials, the opossum has a true thumb to his hind foot,
which he uses like a hand, besides possessing a very flex-
ible tail ; and the opossum is not only proverbially cun-
ning, but he also has alone succeeded in holding his own
among the highly developed mammals of America,
while all the rest of his kind are now confined to Aus-
tralia, their compeers elsewhere having been killed out
without exception during the tertiary period by the
fierce competition of the larger continents. Wherever we
find a clever animal, like the dog, without any grasping

A SQUIRREL'S NP:ST. 93

power, we also find a large development of the sense of
smell, which may be regarded as to some extent com-
pensatory. But it must never be forgotten that the
cleverness of the dog has been greatly increased by long
hereditary intercourse with man, while the cleverness of
the elephant, the monkey, and the opossum is all native
and self-evolved. The squirrel's paws stand him in al-
most equally good stead. For though he has no opposa-
ble thumb, he can hold a nut or a fruit between them,
rolling it about or adjusting it meanwhile ; and his teeth
also serve as regular tools, which further enable him to
manipulate an object held in his paws almost as well as
any other animal except the apes and monkeys. It is
observable, too, that his tail belongs markedly to one of
the two types common among forestine tree-haunting
creatures. Those which crawl or hang among the
boughs have generally prehensile tails to aid them in
grasping the branches ; those which run and leap from
tree to tree have generally bushy tails to aid them in
balancing themselves, and to act as a sort of aerial rud-
der. In the flying squirrels and many other similar ex-
otic types the use of such tails as a parachute is supple-
mented by extensible folds of loose skin stretching
between the legs or the fingers.

A group which shows so much variety of specialization
for its peculiar functions is likely to be an old one ; and
in fact the squirrels rank among our oldest surviving in-
digenous mammals. As a class, they date back as far
in geological time as the lower miocene ; and even our
English species must have inhabited this country, practi-
cally unchanged in appearance or habits, for many
thousands of years, except when driven temporarily
southward by stress of passing glacial periods.

XYIL

FOES IN THE HATFIELD.

THIS week must be marked not with chalk but with
charcoal in the Fasti of the farm, for one of our annual
plagues has duly recurred in full vigor. The yellow-
rattle has got somehow or other into the three-cornered
Croft, and nothing seems to be of any use to get rid of
it. As a rule, one ought not to speak evil of plants
behind their backs ; but for a hungry, persistent, de-
liberate, designing, importunate parasite, your yellow-
rattle has really no fellow. There is not a single redeem-
ing point about it : it is ugly, useless, and uninteresting ;
and it makes a wretched living by fastening on the roots
of grasses and draining them dry with its horrid clinging
suckers. See here : if you pull up a tuft of meadow
foxtail carefully, you find the rattle actually engaged in
sucking its life-blood at this very moment. Kinse the
two stocks together in the basin where the brook runs
clear from the culvert for a foot or two to make a drink-
ing-place for the cattle, and when the soil is washed
away you will be able to see the actual mouths by which
it fastens itself to the rootlets of its host. The hay in
the croft will not be worth much this season : it seldom
is ; for rattle dwarfs the grasses terribly, and makes
hard, dry, stringy fodder itself into the bargain. There
is nothing for it but stubbing the whole patch ; and
even that would be very little good, for the soil here ex-
actly suits its constitution. Curiously enough, just over
the hedge in the Fore Acre, there is not a single stalk
of it to be seen, even by accident.

FOES IN THE HAYFIELD. 95

The rattles are a whole group of half -developed para-
sites well on the way to the worst stage of degradation ,
though not yet so utterly degenerate as the leafless tooth-
worts or the scaly broomrapes. They can still grow
feebly if left to themselves ; for when you sow the seeds
alone in a flower-pot, by way of experiment, the young
seedlings will rise to an inch or two, put forth a few
scrubby leaves, and blossom poorly with a couple of
straggling flowers or so. But when you let them have
some nice vigorous grass-plants in the same pot, they fix
upon them immediately, and grow to a foot in height,
with a comparatively fine spike of pale primrose flowers,
which children sometimes know as cockscombs. Eye-
bright has just the same trick ; and so have the two red-
rattles, cow-wheat, and others of their kind. There are
some parasites, like mistletoe, whose parasitism has be-
come so deeply ingrained that their seeds will not even
sprout except on the body of a proper host ; and these
have adapted themselves to their peculiar habits by ac-
quiring very sticky berries, which fall on a bough, and
are gummed there by their own bird-lime. Even such
a hardened offender as the mistletoe, however, has par-
tially green leaves which assimilate food on their own ac-
count. But there are other and still more abandoned
parasites, like yellow bird's-nest, which have no leaves
at all, and cannot provide themselves with food in any
way. Yellow bird's-nest is a very rare plant in England
— a degraded relation of the heaths, which has taken en-
tirely to living on the roots of trees, sucking up their
juices by its network of succulent rootlets. Its leaves
have consequently shrunk by disuse into mere pale yel-
lowish scales, not unlike those which one sees on the
young shoots of blanched asparagus. Now, yellow-rattle
and its kind deserve notice as showing the first step on

96 COLIJN" CLOUT'S CALEKDAH.

this downward course : the initial stage through which
the ancestors of the mistletoe must once have passed, and
which the ancestors of the yellow bird's-nest must ages
ago have left behind them. The plants are not in any
way related to one another : on the contrary, they are
extremely unlike, as far as pedigree goes ; but they have
all three independently acquired the same parasitic
habits, and they all exhibit different stages in the same
process of degenerescence.

Ancestrally, yellow-rattle is a near relation of the
pretty little blue veronicas and of the big purple fox-
gloves and snapdragons. It has a flower of the very
highest type — one of those curious one-sided mask-like
blossoms with an upper and an under lip which are the
product of special insect fertilization and selection ex-
erted throughout innumerable generations. Flowers of
such a sort are the birthright of the most advanced fami-
lies alone. But this particular snapdragon family is one
of the most plastic and versatile in all nature. It may
seem fanciful to say so, but there are certain groups of
plants which really appear to be cleverer and shiftier
than all others, to have a greater power of adapting them-
selves by strange side modifications to the most diverse
situations. Perhaps one ought rather to say that they
are groups whose ancestors have undergone much varia-
tion, so that at last a tendency to vary easily has become
hereditary with them all. Of such families, the orchids
and the snapdragons are the most conspicuous ; and they
differ so much and so quaintly among themselves that
one can hardly avoid involuntarily attributing to them a
sort of human spontaneity and deliberate design. Some
of them mimic the forms and colors of insects ; others
assume the most fantastic shapes and hues — apparently
out of pure wantonness, but really in order to insure

FOES IK THE HAYFIELD. 97

fertilization by the oddest and most improbable methods.
The common snapdragon, for example, has the mouth
of its blossom tightly closed by a projecting palate, so as
to exclude all insects except the correlated kind of bee,
whose weight as he lights on the lip suffices to press
down the door and give aim access to the sealed tube,
with its nectar secreted in a little pouch at the far end.
As soon as he flies away the palate snaps back again, and
closes the entrance once more till another bee presents
himself on the threshold. The yellow-rattle has just as
complicated an arrangement on a smaller scale, with an
arched and flattened upper lip, flanked by two purple-
spotted wings, as well as a lobed lower lip, deeply
divided into three distinct segments. The flowers are
minutely arranged for fertilization by bees ; and the
insect is obliged to thrust his proboscis between the
closely locked and hairy stamens in order to get at the
honey. In doing so, he necessarily shakes out the pol-
len, which he carries away with him on his head to the
next blossom.

In a very plastic and variable family such as this,
the general plasticity seems to affect every part of the
plant. While the flowers still preserve throughout the
same fundamental botanical type, they vary so much
from kind to kind in all conspicuous outer peculiarities
that a casual observer would probably fail to see any
resemblance at all between them. Even this little minor
group of half-parasitic root-suckers has several different
shapes of flowers, each adapted in a particular fashion of
its own to insect fertilization. Again, their coloring
varies widely. If you take a very simple and primitive
group like the buttercups, you will find dozens of species
all of the same golden yellow, and all uniformly colored
in every part of the flower. But if you take a family

98 COLIN" CLOUT'S CALEHDAK.

like these snapdragons, you will find no two species
colored alike, and most species wonderfully spotted
and dappled with mingling yellow, blue, and purple.
Once more, the leaves vary immensely : each kind hits
out a separate type for itself, and adapts it exactly to
the soil and sunlight of its particular situation.

"With such universal plasticity of constitution as this,
it is easy to understand how the parasitic habit could
have been acquired and maintained. The little eye-
bright which grows so abundantly on roadside commons
is still, perhaps, in the earliest stage of the practice. Its
flowers are most like the blue speedwells, though much
streaked with red, white, and purple ; and its roots only
suck nutriment slightly from the thin rootlets of the
grasses about it. It does far less harm in meadows than
yellow-rattle, and is hardly recognized by farmers as a
distinct enemy at all. Next to it, apparently, come the
two red-rattles—marshy plants with much more special-
ized flowers, and queer fleshy jagged leaves ; they also
do but little practical damage, because they frequent
swamps, and feed only at the expense of the rank grass
in water-logged patches of meadows. Then come the
still more parasitical cow- wheats, very injurious to stand-
ing corn, but happily rare in England except on the
south-east coast. In Norfolk, purple cow- wheat is a
regular pest, one of the worst possible cornfield weeds,
and very difficult to eradicate, since it sheds its seeds
before the harvest is reaped. This plant shows in an
incipient form the common tendency of advanced
parasites to lose the greenness of their leaves ; and
when once a weed has finally reached that depth of
degradation it must feed forever in future upon the
juices of its host, having no chlorophyl of its own with
which to assimilate starches for itself from the air. Last

FOES IN THE HAYFIELD. 99

of all, yellow-rattle completes the list, and draws more
than half its sustenance from the throttled grasses on
which it fastens. In time such plants may sink to the
absolutely leafless condition of broomrape or toothwort.
If so, however, they must acquire some plan for
diffusing their seeds more widely and more certainly, so
as to fix themselves from the first on the tissues of some
other weed. At present the seeds of rattle are large,
flat, and winged ; and when ripe they clatter about
noisily inside the swollen calyx and pod, till a high wind
blows them out and away. Children shake the pods to
make them rattle, which gives the weed its common
English name. The variability that has made the
whole family what it is may still be marked with our
own eyes ; for both rattle and eyebright have so many
varieties and transitory forms that they have been split
up into numberless separate races by botanists with an
itch for seeing their own names as authorities at the end
of a new species. When there is much variation some
forms are sure to possess small points of advantage ;
and it is these small points that natural selection soon
fixes into permanent characteristics of new races.

XYIII.

HAYMAKING BEGINS.

THE early season has told upon the hay more than upon
any other crop this year, perhaps ; and the thick swathes
are already lying in long parallel curves upon the bulging
side of Stonebarrow Hill. There is no more beautiful
sight among all the beautiful sights of the country than to
see the scythes following one another in measured rhythm
along a convex undulation on the hill-side, and to watch
the swathes forming, as if by magic, in regular ranks
behind each mower as he moves quickly and skilfully
across the transformed field. It is a graceful combina-
tion of natural beauty and simple human art : a combina-
tion in which each rather adds to than diminishes the
effect of the other. Behind the mowers, in the still un-
cut portion of the meadow, the grasses sway and bend
before the wind in broken curves — looking almost as
though the whole mass were moving swiftly like a river
in the direction of the breeze. But in the foreground,
the long even line of the mown edge stands up sharply
like a wall with human regularity ; and still nearer, the
great sweeping rows of fresh hay lie one in front of the
other with human consecutiveness. In the level field
that fills up the alluvial valley below, one can see the
same thing more strikingly displayed ; for there the
crop is crimson clover, a wide expanse of such color as
we rarely find on English meadows ; and it has been cut
into squarely for fresh fodder, so that a great rectangular
patch of green runs abruptly into the serried ranks of

HAYMAKING BEGINS. 101

wind-swept crimson heads. Add the mingled scent of
the new-mown hay and the still-flowering clover, and
you have such a profusion of rustic sense-pleasures before
you as satisfies the vacant mind with that monochrome
hedonism which, in spite of the ethical philosophers, is,
after all, one of the purest charms in our little human
life.

• Hay, say the dictionary-makers, is dry grass ; and
yet it is curious, when you come to look into it, how
small a portion of the sum- total the grass itself really
makes up. To be sure, grasses form the tallest and
most conspicuous part of the herbage : their tufted
heads, now purpled with the downy bloom, overtop all
the shorter ingredients, and so of course strike our eyes
most forcibly as we gaze across the swaying and surg-
ing mass. But in truth they are only that element in
the meadow which has been forced upward by the com-
petition of the other kinds ; they have tall thin blades
adapted to the circumstances ; and they must get their
spikes of blossom well above the interfering things at
their base, because they are wind-fertilized, so that they
want abundant free space for the pollen to be wafted
from head to head. If you look closely into our English
greensward anywhere, you will see that all the grasses
put together hardly make up one half of its component
elements.

See here in the pasture, a large part consists of
buttercup stems, uncropped by the cows ; of plantains,
with their ribbed leaves almost rivalling the blades of
the grasses ; and of little spreading daisies, with their
close rosette of foliage pressed hard and tight against
the naked ground, so as to prevent the struggling
young seedlings of the grass from pushing their way
between the overlapping tufts. It is just the same in

102 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

the meadow : there, in between the haulms of grass, you
get a thick and matted undergrowth of Dutch clover,
yellow medick, and rusty-red sorrel, besides all the taller
meadow flowers — such as buttercups, corn poppies, and
ox-eye daisies. These last make up a large and curious
group, the true weeds of cultivation. They are as
purely of human origin in most cases as wheat or barley :
they have assumed their existing shapes under the in-
fluence of man's handicraft. And yet they differ in one
important particular — that they are dependent upon him
involuntarily instead of voluntarily : they are results of
his weakness, not of his strength.

Take first these two wild yellow weeds by the hedge-
row as examples of what man's definite and intentional
selection has done. A casual observer would hardly
know them from charlock ; for they have much the same
golden flowers, and grow in much the same straggling
weedy way ; but their leaves have no stalks, and even
in the rougher of the two they are far from being so
prickly to handle. This one with the bluish tinge upon
its foliage — a Greek would have called it glaucous — is
wild cabbage ; and from just such a tall, stringy weed
as that, all stalk and no heart, constant human selec-
tion has developed not only all the garden cabbages, red
or white, but hoc genus omne — cauliflowers, broccolis,
kales, Brussels sprouts, and fifty other varieties as well.
Over-feed and over-breed the leaves, and you get at last
a cabbage ; over-nourish the flower-buds, and you get
at last a cauliflower. Again, this other scrubby plant,
with tails to its leaves clasping the stem, is the origin of
all our turnip kinds. In itself, it differs almost inappre-
ciably from the ancestor of the cabbages ; but its tap-
root is just a trifle fuller and rounder ; and hence, when
primitive man first pulled it up, he did not eat its

HAYMAKING BEGINS. 103

prickly leaves, but boiled its round underground knob
instead. So, too, when he began to cultivate the two
weeds in his little garden patch,- he selected his cabbages
for their hearts and his turnips for their roots. But so
plastic are all these forms, that while later man has made
the wild root turn into a cultivated turnip for himself
and his sheep, he has made it turn equally at will into a
swede for his cattle, arift he has developed it into a rape-
seed for the manufacture of his colza oil. Let any one
of these artificial varieties alone on its own resources,
and after a few generations it will revert to the original
wild cabbage or wild turnip, as the case may be. But if
we found the different cultivated plants all growing in a
wild state we should say not only that they \» :re good
species, but also that they were much better species than
the wild cabbage or the wild turnip from which they
sprang. The cultivated varieties differ more among
themselves than their wild originals differ from one
another.

Now, unconsciously and involuntarily, man has simi-
larly altered many wild plants which grow, or once
grew, upon his cultivated plains. By tilling almost all
the alluvial lowlands and prairie stretches of Europe and
Asia, and still later of America, he has produced such a
series of changes in the native plants that many of them
have become at last pure weeds of cultivation. There
are some, like pimpernel and shepherd's-purse, that we
only know in this form ; they grow always on culti-
vated ground or waste patches, and their truly wild
types are now utterly extinct and irrecoverable. None
are more peculiar in this respect than the weeds that
frequent cornfields and meadows ; and perhaps their
most marked peculiarity is their exact synchronism with
the grass or the wheat among which they grow. All of

104 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

them spring up together, flower together, and ripen their
seeds together. They are cut down with the crops ;
their seeds are sown with the crops ; and they are
carried to all parts of the world with the seed-corn and
the grasses. At first sight people are inclined to say
that this is pushing a true principle too far : cultivation,
they think, has existed on the earth for so short a period
that natural selection has not yet tiad time to act upon its
concomitant weeds. They might almost as well object
to an account of a shipwreck in which only the best
swimmers escaped, on the ground that in those few
minutes natural selection would not have time to single
out the bravest muscles and the strongest thews. There
are circumstances in which the selection is absolute and
instantaneous — as, for example, in prairie-fires or sub-
merged islands. The annual cutting of the corn and the
grasses acts almost as absolutely and effectively. From
year to year, at a relatively fixed date, every plant in
vast tracts of cultivated country is cut down and carried
away from the fields. Most of these plants are peculiar
to the tilth of the lowlands ; they are different in type
both from the woodland flowers and from the hedgerow
weeds. Hence their only chance of survival is by ex-
actly adapting their own habits to those of the food-
plants among which they dwell.

In the beginning, no doubt, they varied greatly in
their periods of development ; some were earlier and
some later. But every weed which ripened its seeds too
late would naturally be cut down green, so as to perish
utterly ; while every weed which ripened them too early
would stand a fair chance of having them buried beneath
a whole sod's thickness of ploughed land. Thus only
those which happened exactly to tally in time with the
corn or the grasses would succeed on an average in keep-

HAYMAKING BEGINS. 105

ing their position ; so that at last the farmer often posi-
tively sows corn-cockles and thistles broadcast with the
grain that he scatters on his fields. They go with the
seeds to America and Australia, and they live down the
native plants in New Zealand or the Cape Colony.
What we see in this illustrative example of their seeding
is equally true in all their other peculiarities. They
have been compelled to adapt themselves to the new
conditions by such a stringent selection as seldom or
never occurs in natural circumstances. Prairie-fires or
inundations take place once in an age, on a single spot
at least ; but the animal ploughing of the fields does
almost as much every year as these catastrophes can
accomplish in a whole century. Indeed, no form of
selection is really so severe as that thus unconsciously
exercised by man. And when we remember that he
has tilled and reaped cereal grains ever since the days
when he ground his flint hatchets beneath the primeval
beech-forests of prehistoric Europe, it is not surprising
that appropriate interloping plants should have had time
to develop themselves in his cultivated patches. How-
ever small those patches were, they must from the
'beginning have possessed their own peculiar types of
weeds.

XIX.

THE MOLE AT HOME.

HERE in the barton of Colway Farm I have just come
across the farmer's museum — a barn-door with dead
weasels nailed against it for a warning to evil-doers ;
which museum also contains the warped skins of no
fewer than eleven indigenous British mammals, including
bats, shrews, water-rats, moles, and harvest-mice. As I
stand by the barn-door examining the dried and withered
skins at leisure, young Tom Wootton comes up with a
basket of something or other on his arm. te What 'ast
got there, Tom ?" I ask him, in our native West Saxon
tongue ; and Tom, with a broad grin on his face at the
question, answers, " Wunts, zur, wunts to hang up along-
zide o' they others." Perhaps it may be necessary to
inform the untutored dwellers in cities that want or wont
is the good old English name of those underground
animals which we nowadays chiefly know as moles:
Tom is wunt-catcher by appointment to the farm, and
he has just made a capture of half a dozen from the
troublesome runs in the Home Fields. I take one of
the poor things out cautiously by its short stumpy tail,
and examine it all round with a critical eye.

It is a curious creature, to be sure, this mole, and
one of the best examples of the kind of wild animals
that still manage to drag out a miserable existence in
English meadows or pastures. The mole is in structure
an insectivore, one of that great central mammalian
order which best keeps up for us to the present day the

THE MOLE AT SOME. 10?

primitive peculiarities of the whole class of mammals.
They have all small brains, and very little developed
limbs or organs. They are the least specialized of all
quadrupeds, the kinds which have diverged the least
from the first ancestral rough sketch of the mammalian
type. Compared with a horse, a deer, an elephant, or a
cat, one feels at once that moles, hedgehogs, and shrews
are very simple and undeveloped forms. Even exter-
nally they have not the formed limbs and highly modi-
fied weapons or extremities of these higher animals ; in-
stead of a solid hoof they have five rude simple claws ;
instead of powerful tearing teeth they have a weak and
primitive dentition ; while of course they have no such
peculiar appendages as horns, antlers, tusks, a trunk, an
opposable thumb, or a prehensile tail.

This simplicity and central character in their outer
shape is answered by an equal simplicity in anatomical
characters. They are, in fact, a few skulking represen-
tatives of a very early type, which do not come into
competition with the higher and later forms because of
their nocturnal or underground habits, and so survive
comparatively unchanged ; while all the better places in
the hierarchy of nature are filled by more advanced and
specially adapted creatures.

On the other hand, if you look closely at this mole,
you will see that while in general type it has varied but
little from the primitive mammalian ancestor, it has yet
undergone modification in many small points of some
importance, so as closely to adapt it to its existing mode
of life. The insectivores, qua insectivore, are intensely
primitive, but each one of them, qua mole, or water-
shrew, or hedgehog, is a very specialized kind of insec-
tivore indeed. This mole here, for example, has a pair
of naked, flat, and powerful forepaws, turned curiously

108 COLIN CLOUT 'S CALENDAR.

outward, for shovelling out the earth from his tunnels ;
they look singularly like the human hand, and are wholly
different from the webbed fingers of the oared shrew, or
the simple flat feet of the hedgehog. Ages and ages
ago the ancestors of the mole took to burrowing in the
ground for a livelihood, and all their structure has long
since been accommodated by use and wont or by natural
selection to their peculiar habits. It is easy enough to
see, indeed, how a burrowing insectivore might readily
acquire the special mode of life now so deeply ingrained
in the race of moles. At first, no doubt, it would take
to digging a hole in the earth simply for protection, like
rabbits and mice ; but, as it must thus necessarily come
across the long tunnels and nests of Mr. Darwin's friends
the earthworms, it would naturally eat these congenial
morsels of food, which a herbivore like the rabbit could
not touch. A certain number of such original undiffer-
entiated ancestors of the mole would be sure to find an
easier living by hunting the worms underground than by
looking for beetles and slugs on the surface, like the
hedgehogs, especially if they happened to be of a pow-
erful muscular build. The habit of digging rapidly
through the ground would increase their strength from
generation to generation ; and natural selection would
co-operate with habit by weeding out all those individu-
als whose paws or shape was less adapted to burrowing,
and preserving those which best fulfilled the new condi-
tions of existence. The strongest prototypical mole,
with the biggest shovel-shaped forefeet, and the sharpest
snout for extracting the worm from his circular tunnel,
would obtain the greatest quantity of food, and starve
out his less developed competitors. So in time all the
existing peculiarities of the species would come to be
evolved, till at last each country possessed a mole exactly

THE MOLE AT HOME. 109

adapted to its own special varieties of soil and earth-
worms.

Our own English mole has now acquired a shape
and structure admirably fitted to his station in life. He
has immensely powerful muscles, which enable him to
plough through the soil with astonishing rapidity, as
anybody knows who has once seen the earth heaving
and swelling beneath the turf where he is at work
constructing a new tunnel. In order to make up for
this immense expenditure of energy, he requires a pro-
portionately enormous quantity of food ; his appetite is
positively ravenous, and he starves if forced to fast for
only half a day, except during his brief period of hiber-
nation. As a rule, he works for three hours at a time,
then rests three hours, then works again, and so on
perpetually. His fur is very thick and close, so as to
prevent dust from getting at the skin ; and it is ex-
tremely soft, so as not to rub against the burrows and
cause vibrations in the earth, which, as Mr. Darwin has
shown, frighten away the timid worms. His slender
snout both forms a wedge to loosen the soil and enables
him the better to pick his clinging prey from its narrow
concreted tunnel. On the other hand, an eye is almost
useless to a subterranean creature, and so it has become
practically all but obsolete, being quite buried beneath
the skin. In all probability it is only sensitive to the
presence or absence of light, not to definite forms and
colors. Like most other miners, he dearly loves a fight,
for which purpose he meets his rival above-ground by
night, and does battle with a fierceness and pugnacity
that are truly astonishing.

The mole has a certain number of regular paths, along
which he makes his way rapidly and noiselessly through
his hunting-grounds, catching all the stray worms that

110 COLIH CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

chance to "be passing on the way ; for, after a burrow is
once made, it remains open all that season as a sort of
permanent pitfall, intersecting many worm - tunnels.
During winter, or at least in times of frost, he retires to
what is called his fortress, containing a circular nest,
with one or two irregular galleries for escape, in case he
is attacked by man or carnivores. The very symmetrical
ground-plan of these fortresses, however, which has been
copied over and over again in popular books from a
sketch by an imaginative French naturalist, seems to me
ridiculously overdone in the matter of systematic com-
pleteness. The real fortress is comparatively a very
simple matter — I have seen Tom open dozens of them —
and has only a few quite casual-looking passages instead
of the complicated circular galleries with equidistant
exits and five internal communications shown in the
well-known picture. "While the frost lasts the hungry
animal lies coiled up dormant in this hibernating cham-
ber ; but the moment a thaw sets in, and the worms can
get about once more, he is out at once, and you can track
his path everywhere through the meadows by his numer-
ous little mounds of soft fresh mould. As an enemy of
our benefactor the earthworm he is no doubt fair sport
for man ; but I often fancy he must do much good in
his way, too, by loosening the soil and letting it crumble
down and mellow in the open air.

XX.

JULY FLOWERS.

SEE here, straggling over the tall weeds on the bank,
to which it clings by its twining curled tendrils, I have
lighted on a graceful spray of the true vetch, with its
pretty purplish pea-flowers and its long, shiny, grass-
green pods. It is a common plant enough, this southern
vetch ; for though it is not an aboriginal inhabitant of
Britain, it has been cultivated for fodder so long in our
meadows that it is now perfectly acclimatized, and
spreads readily like a native denizen among pastures and
waste patches. But what gives it a special interest at the
present moment is that I have caught it, so to speak, in
the very act, helping to verify an old surmise as to the
true purpose of these little black spots on- the flaps or
wings that guard each separate flower-stalk. At the
point where the blossoms spring from the stem you will
notice two small barbed leaflets — stipules we call them
technically — each with a round dark patch in its hollow
centre. Now, if you look at them closely, you will see
that the dark patches are moist with some viscid sub-
stance ; and if you taste it you will find that it is nothing
more or less than a drop of pure honey.

On this particular vetch-vine, however, each of these
leafy nectaries is now being eagerly attacked by small
black ants, who are greedily sipping up the honey as fast
as it exudes. There cannot be much doubt that that is
the very purpose for which the nectaries are put there.
Ants are known to be terrible honey thieves ; and they

112 COLIST CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

are perpetually trying to get at the store of sweets
which the plant has laid by in the base of its flower to
allure the fertilizing bees. But any flower which is thus
rifled will never be visited or impregnated by insect visit-
ors ; and so those plants whose structure aids them by
any chance trick or sport in baffling the ants will be the
only ones that can set their seeds and become the parents
of future generations. Hence, almost all honey -bearing
flowers have inherited some peculiar modification of
structure which enables them to set at defiance all such
creeping marauders. Many of them have stalks covered
with long hairs — often star-shaped at the end (as one can
see even through a little pocket lens), or tipped on top
with small, round, sticky glands. Now, there is nothing
that bothers ants so much as hairs : they seem as incapa-
ble of getting through them as a cow is incapable of
getting through a thickset hedge. Other plants, again,
secrete a gummy exudation on the stem, in which the
wretched foragers get clogged and slowly killed, like
flies on a plate of treacle. But the vetch has few hairs
and no sticky glands, so it tries to bribe the ants by
throwing them a sop instead. The nectaries on the
stipules distract them from the flowers ; and if you
watch you will see that the ants never mount the slender
flower-stalks at all, but go straight up the main stern
from one such extra-floral honey -gland to another. No
doubt they never discover the existence of the real flow-
ers at all. Thus, by the sacrifice of a little sugar at the
base of each flower-stalk, the vetch secures its precious
blossoms from robbery and consequent barrenness.
Curiously enough, there are two nascent varieties of this
common vetch, not yet fully differentiated into species
— one of them hairy while the other is smooth ; and in
almost every case the hairiest specimens, being already

JULY FLOWERS. 113

sufficiently protected by their forest of tiny bristles,
secrete little or no honey. Probably they are now in
course of acquiring the habit of doing without it.

The immense variety of adaptation to external circum-
stances in the same family, indeed, is nowhere more con-
spicuously seen than in our English peaflowers. Funda-
mentally, they are all so like one another that even the
most unlearned eye at once admits their relationship ;
for who cannot recognize the close similarity between
peas and beans, gorse and broom, vetch and clover ?
Yet almost all of them, while retaining at bottom the
fundamental ancestral traits, have hit out the most
diverse plans for accommodating themselves to their
own particular circumstances. For example, there are
four July pea-blossoms now in flower which have four
distinct and separate types or methods for insuring insect
fertilization. In this bright yellow lotus, that covers all
the bank with its clustered masses of gold, the pressure
of the bee pumps out the pollen through a small aper-
ture at the top against his breast. In the broom and
gorse, his weight makes the whole flower burst open
elastically, and dusts him from head to foot with the
fertilizing grains. In the clovers, the stamens are
pushed bodily against the insect's bosom so as to shed
their store upon his legs. Last of all, in the peas and
vetches the pollen is swept out as he lights, by a brush
of haire on the surface of the pistil.

Each of these main types assumes specialized minor
forms in the various genera and species, according as
they have peculiarly adapted themselves to hive -bees or
humble-bees, to flies or to beetles. It is much the same
with their fruits or pods. This vetch here, as we all
know, is largely grown for fodder, because of its rich
pea-like seeds, well stored with starches and albumens

114 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

for the growth of the young plant. Indeed, the pea kind
ranks next to the grasses as a producer of human food-
stuffs— supplying us with peas, beans, lentils, and many
other well-known pulses. But these rich seeds are
always much sought after by animals as food ; and there-
fore the plants have been driven to devise the most cu-
rious plans for thwarting their enemies ; or, in other
words, those which showed any tendency in the direction
of producing inedible pods have thereby gained an ad-
vantage over their competitors and survived accordingly.
Here, for example, is a sprig of yellow nonsuch, a clover-
like trailer grown in the meadows as an " artificial
grass," because of its rich little beans, concealed in the
small black kidney-shaped pods ; this is a relatively ill-
adapted form, largely preserved by man's providence.
But here again is a bit of the truly wild medick, a
closely allied plant, which farmers hate ; for the cattle
will scarcely touch it, so sternly has it armed itself
against their dreaded depredations. In leaf, flower, and
general appearance the two are typical pea-plants, differ-
ing but very little from one another. But in their fruit
they are extremely unlike. The medick has a long
curved pod, completely twisted round and curled tightly
up into a close spiral, so that it looks more like a little
brown ball than a common pea-pod. All round the edge
this ball is thickly defended by double rows of stout
hooked prickles, which naturally make it about as un-
pleasant to the mouths of the cattle as a burr or a thistle.
The subterranean clover is another pea-flower, which
solves the same problem in a different way by burying
its own seeds beneath the sod. And this wee creeping
bird's-foot, which like many of its small congeners, has
to fear the birds more than the sheep or cattle, avoids
opening its pod to shed its tiny beans by making it solid

JULY FLOWEKS. 115

all round, and then dropping off, as it ripens, into little
articulated pieces, each containing a single seed. The
pod, in fact, divides at the joints between the beans, and
so disappoints the birds, who always wait in other cases
till the valves burst open. Wild radish, or " jointed
charlock" as the farmers call it, has independently
adopted the self-same plan in the widely different fam-
ily of the cresses. As to peculiarities in the number
and shape of the seeds themselves, the hairiness or
smoothness of the pods, the color and consistency of
their coverings and so forth — among the peaflowers alone
they are practically innumerable ; and each has its own
definite purpose, generally discoverable in the end by a
little careful observation and minute comparison.

The leaves, again, vary immensely, though always
strictly by derivation from a single ideal or ancestral
type. The typical leaf of the pea-kind has a central
stalk, with little leaflets arranged in opposite pairs along
its course, and a similar terminal leaflet at the end. This
is the form the foliage still assumes in lady's-fingers,
bird's-foot, and many other species. But in the clovers,
and similar stunted creeping meadow plants, there is not
much material to spare upon the leaves, and so they only
develop one terminal leaflet with a single pair of lateral
ones beneath it : in other words, they are shortened into
trefoils. The complementary leaflets on each stalk
remain always undeveloped. In these vetches, again,
and still more in the true peas, it is the terminal leaflets
that are wanting ; and in their place the end of the
common leaf -stalk lengthens out into twining tendrils,
which help the branches to creep over other plants, so as
to gain a decided advantage in the struggle for life over
the little procumbent clovers.

Sometimes among the peas, however, circumstances

116 COLIN" CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

call for a different modification ; and then we get all sorts
of curious distortions or abortions, as the case may de-
mand. Thus the beautiful pink grass - pea, growing
among tall blades on borders or fields, requires foliage
like the grasses themselves, in order to compete with
them on terms of equality ; and it has achieved its end
by dwarfing the leaflets till they have disappeared alto-
gether, while at the same time the denuded leaf -stalk has
flattened out into a broad blade, exactly imitating the
grasses among which it lives. In its close relative the
yellow vetchling all the true leaves are reduced to a long
tendril ; but to make up for them the barbed stipules or
flaps, normally mere tags about a quarter of an inch
long, have grown out into a pair of expanded and heart-
shaped green leaves. Here we must suppose that from
generation to generation the original leaflets got less and
less work to do, and so gradually died away by mere dis-
use ; while at the same time the leaf -stalk in the one case
and the stipules in the other grew larger and larger to
perform their new functions, because such organs were
better able to perform them under those peculiar condi-
tions than the ancestral leaflets, derived from a progeni-
tor of very different tastes and habits. Strangest of all,
in gorse the leaves assume the guise of stout green
thorns ; though the young seedlings have first trefoil
foliage, like the clovers, and only gradually produce more
and more lance-shaped blades as they reach the adult
condition. Here protection from animals is obviously
the object in view. Yet so rich is nature that all these
varieties of flowers, fruits, and leaves occur within the
limits of a single family ; and they may all be observed
together at this very moment in the July meadows or
commons of southern England,

XXI.

CHERRIES ARE RIPE.

THE big whitehearts on the first tree in the orchard
are just beginning to blush in ruddy streaks on the sunny
side, and the wasps are already finding their way to the
softer red pulp of the ripening bigaroons by the further
hedgerow. Altogether the little mixed cottage orchard
makes up a very pretty picture at the present moment.
The gnarled old apple-trees, their limbs thickly covered
with dry gray lichen, are now in full summer foliage ;
and the green and gray, seen from a little distance, melt
together into a beautiful mass of soft subdued color.
The late pink hawthorn is still in half -faded blossom ;
the elder is one sheet of white bloom ; while the cherries
are rapidly mellowing into pink and crimson. No fruit,
indeed, except perhaps the orange, is prettier- or more
tempting as it hangs on the tree than our English cherry.
Besides, it is a son of the soil, a native born ; and, in
spite of all that gardeners can do, our real indigenous
fruits thrive better to the last in English mould than
any imported aliens. The cherry-trees of our orchards
spring, in fact, from two separate wild British stocks.
The common dwarf cherry, whose large white blossoms
often hang out of thickets and copses in early spring, is
the ancestor of morellos, dukes, and the Kentish kind ;
the taller gean, found wild only in the southern counties,
is the strain from which we get our bigaroons and other
sweet table-fruit. Selection can do wonderful things ;
but it absolutely requires the positive basis of natural

118 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

variation to work upon. Though it would be quite pos-
sible to make a serviceable fruit out of a haw or a dog-
rose, we may well doubt whether in untold ages man
could ever make a serviceable fruit out of a heath or a
thistle. So far as we can judge, the natural variations
which tend toward succulence and pulpiness never seem
to manifest themselves at all in the group of plants to
which the heaths and the thistles belong.

It is quite otherwise with the tribe of roses : including
not only the peach, the nectarine, the plum, and the
cherry ; but also the strawberry, the blackberry, the
raspberry, the cloudberry, the apple, the pear, and the
mountain-ash as well. Throughout all this family a strong
native tendency exists toward the spontaneous produc-
tion of juicy fruits. The roses, in fact, are the great
fruit-bearers of the world ; just as the grasses are its
grain-producers, and the catkin tribe its manufacturers
of solid timber. It is interesting to decipher anew the
steps by which the chief groups of plants and animals,
afterward turned to account by man for his own pur-
poses, were originally developed, quite apart from his
future needs, by the interaction of an environment in
which as yet he bore no share. Just as at the present
day, when he settles in a new region teeming with un-
tried natural productions, he exploits them all for his
own service ; draining gutta-percha here, extracting dye-
stuffs there, and discovering new starches in yam or
sago-palm, potato or cassava yonder — so at his first ap-
pearance upon earth he took in hand the various things
already evolved in it by pre-existing agencies, and
moulded their properties as best he might to his personal
uses. Each of them had a function of its own in refer-
ence to the needs of the organism to which it belonged :
man adapted them to his special human wants.

CHERRIES ARE RIPE. 119

But the ultimate origin of the pulpiness in plums and
cherries was quite antecedent to any particular adoption
of their stocks in the primitive orchards of early man.
So far as we can now tell, the roses do not date back in
time beyond the tertiary period of geology. The very
earliest members of the family still extant are little
creeping herbs, like cinquefoil and silver-weed, with yel-
low blossoms (all primitive blossoms, indeed, are yellow)
and small, dry, inedible seeds. The strawberry is the
lowest type of rose above these very simple forms. It
is still a creeping herb, and its seeds are still small, dry,
and inedible ; but they are imbedded in a juicy pulp
which entices birds to swallow them, and so aid in dis-
persing them under circumstances peculiarly favorable
to their due germination and growth. Next in order
after this earliest rude succulent type (nature's first
rough sketch of a fruit, so to speak ; and a very suc-
cessful one too, from the human point of view at least)
come the blackberry and raspberry ; where the individ-
ual fruitlets grow soft, sweet, and pulpy, instead of re-
maining dry as in the strawberry. And this change
clearly marks a step in advance ; so that blackberries
and raspberries are enabled to get along with fewer
seeds, and yet to thrive much better in the struggle for
life too — seeing that they have developed into stout
wood trailers, often forming considerable thickets, and
killing down all the lesser vegetation beneath and
between them. Again, the dog-roses show still higher
development, alike in their erect bushy form, in then-
large pink flowers, and in their big scarlet hips — which
are uneatable by us, it is true, but are great favorites
with birds in severe winters. The haws of the white
thorn are even more successful in attracting the robins
and other non-migratory allies ; and the white thorn has

120 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAB.

been enabled, accordingly, to reduce its seeds to one or
two, each inclosed in a hard, bony, indigestible nut.
Finally, at the very summit of the genealogical tree, we
get the plum tribe, highest of all the roses ; growing into
considerable arborescent forms (though in this respect in-
ferior to pears or apples), and producing large, luscious,
pulpy fruits, with a single stony seed, admirably adapted
to the best type of dispersion, and never wasting a soli-
tary germ unnecessarily, as must be continually the case
with its small dry-seeded congeners the silver- weeds and
cinquefoils. Not, of course, that this pedigree must be
accepted in a linear sense (indeed, the roses early in their
history broke up into at least three distinct lines, which
have evolved separately on their own account, and have
culminated respectively in the plums, the true roses,
and the apples) ; but it illustrates the general method of
their development, and it shows the strong tendency
which they all alike possess toward the production of
sweet pulpy fruits in one form or another.

If you look for a moment at a ripe cherry — by prefer-
ence a red one, as being less artificial than the pale
whitehearts — you will see how well it is fitted to perform
the functions for which the tree has produced it. It has
a bright outer coat, to attract the eyes of birds, and
especially of southern birds — for England is near its
northern limit, and it is a big fruit for our native species
to eat ; rowan-berries, haws, and bird-cherries are rather
their special food in our northern latitudes. Then,
again, it has a sweet pulp to tempt their appetite : sweet-
ness and bright color in plants being almost always
directly traceable to animal selection. But inside, its ac-
tual seed is protected by a stony shell ; while its kernel
is stored with rich food-stuffs for the young seedling, laid
by in its thick seed leaves, which form the two lobes of

CHERRIES ARE RIPE. 121

the almond-like embryo. The flower, it is true, has a

jpair of separate ovules, which ought, under ordinary

circumstances, to develop into two seeds ; but as the

fruit ripens one of them almost always atrophies. Such

! diminution in the number of seeds invariably accompa-

Inies every advance in specialization, or every fresh for-

jward step in appliances for more certain distribution.

The little hard nuts on the outside of the strawberry

j number fifty or sixty ; the nutlets of the raspbeny num-

jber only some twenty or thirty ; the pips of the apple,

(relatively ill protected by the leathery core, range from

ifive to ten ; the stones of the haw, with their bonier

covering, are only two ; but in the plum tribe, with their

(extreme adaptation to animal dispersion, the seeds have

reached the minimum irreducibile of one.

It is this highest tribe of all, accordingly, that supplies
us with what we call distinctively our stone-fruits. The
sloes of the common blackthorn have grown under culti-
vation into our domestic plums ; the two wild cherries
have grown into our morellos and bigaroons ; while an
Eastern bush has been gradually developed into our
more delicate apricots. The old-fashioned botanists have
thrust the peach and nectarine into a separate genus,
because of their wrinkled stones ; but common-sense
will show any one that it would be much easier to get a
peach out of an apricot than to get an apricot out of a
plum ; and, indeed, these artificial scientific distinctions
are fast breaking down at the present day. as we learn
more and more about the infinite plasticity of living
forms under cultivation or altered circumstances. Even
the almond, different as its nut appears from the plum
type of fruit, is really a plum by origin ; for in all other
particulars of flower, leaf, and habit it closely resembles
the nectarine, from which it has diverged only in the

COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

solitary specialty of a less juicy fruit. We know how
little trouble it takes to turn a single white may-blossom
into the double pink variety, or to produce our distorted
flowering almonds and our big many-petalled roses from
the normal form : it takes very little more trouble for
nature to turn an apricot into a peach, or to produce a
dry shell-covered almond from a juicy nectarine. Only,
since nature acts more slowly, and since her conditions
remain approximately the same throughout, her new
species do not tend to relapse at once into the parent
form, as our artificial varieties mostly do the moment
we relax the stringent regimen under which they have
been produced.

:

XXII.

DOG-ROSE AND BRAMBLES.

IT always seems as though summer had positively come
in earnest when one pulls the first scented dog-rose of
the season by the wayside. And here at last on the foot-
path through the Vicarage grounds, hedged in on either
hand by clambering brambles and sweetbrier, the wild
roses of every sort are really all in full bloom after a very
summer-like fashion. It is a quaint and pretty old Eng-
lish trick of language that assigns the less useful or beau-
tiful kinds of each rudely grouped family to the lower
animals. The violets without a perfume are dog-vio-
lets ; the chestnut that we cannot eat is horse-chestnut ;
the common parsnip of the fields is cow-parsnip. It is
the same with cat-mint, dog's-mercury, horseradish,
toad-flax, and swine's-cress ; while buckwheat and buck-
beans point back to an older state of things, when
deer were far more familiar beasts than now in English
woodlands. Fool's-parsley puts the same idea in a more
practical and literal light. But who can first have called
so beautiful a flower as this blushing pink blossom I am
holding in my hand by such a name as dog-rose ? Dogs,
I know experimentally, care nothing for the scent of
flowers ; and the dog-rose is the sweetest in scent of all
our English wild roses. Was it merely by way of dis-
tinction from the garden rose that it got its name, or was
it to mark it off from the rarer sweetbrier, whose leaves
are protectively dotted with little rnsty-colored glands,
which give out a delicious aromatic perfume when rub-

124 COLLS CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

bed between the fingers ? I hardly know which expla-
nation is the more likely ; for the common double rose
of our gardens, which is probably a distorted variety of
the French wild rose from the Mediterranean region,
with its central stamens overfed into irregular and super-
numerary petals, has certainly been grown for ornament
since a very early period in English flower-beds. From
that South European stock we get our cabbage-rose and
our moss-roses ; the China roses descend from an Asiatic
species ; while the dear old-fashioned Scotch roses, too
often turned out of our gardens now by the new-fangled
oriental varieties, are cultivated forms of the little burnet
rose, that grows abundantly in sandy districts on our own
western seaboard. All of them, however, will produce
hybrids readily with one another, and with various newer
Asiatic or American kinds : and it is selected varieties
of these hybrids that make up the mass of our modern
over-civilized garden strains.

Indeed, people generally have very little idea how
many distinct species of plants or animals exist in each
great group, or how absolutely they all merge into each
other for the most part by insensible gradations, It is
the inadequate recognition of such facts that makes us
less able to realize the steps by which species change from
form to form as circumstances demand of them. Almost
all the most familiar animals happen to be very distinct
from one another, and from all the wild animals inhabit-
ing Europe ; and this gives us a false idea to start with
of the stability of species. There is no danger of mis-
taking a horse for a donkey, or a sheep for a cow. But
then we too often forget that these animals are purposely
bred as true as possible to an artificial standard ; while
all intermediate links with other kinds have been killed
off the soil — in civilized countries at least — by the spread

DOG-ROSE A1STD BRAMBLES. 125

of tillage. On the other hand, when, as in the case of
rabbits, dogs, and pigeons, we have produced an im-
mense variety of artificial forms, they are generally con-
nected so closely with one another by recent descent that
they all breed easily together ; and we forget their
differences as lop-ears or blacks, terriers or greyhounds,
runts or pouters, in their common points as rabbits,
dogs, or pigeons.

It is not so, however, in the wild life of nature.
There, though some few species are well marked by the
dying out of intermediate forms, the difficulty in most
cases is to find some effective token which will constantly
distinguish one kind of plant or animal from another.
The elephant, it is true, now consists only of two ob-
scurely marked types, Asiatic and African ; because all
the others of his race have died off long since ; though
he was once connected by the ancestors of the mammoth
and the mastodon with a whole line of earlier creatures
intermediate between tapirs, pigs, and horses. But the
cat family are still so well represented in our midst that
you can find somewhere or other every single connecting
link between our own tame cats and the tiger or the
lion ; and most of these would probably prove fertile
with one another, at least along the doubtful border-
land. Those who watch nature closely know how hard
it is to draw an effective line between species anywhere ;
and most observers differ among themselves as to the ex-
act spot at which, if anywhere, it can best be drawn.

Take, for example, our English wild roses and bram-
bles here. This that I hold in my hand is a true dog-
rose, with a scented pinky blossom, and with few or no
glands upon the edges of its leaflets. It is the common-
est English form of all ; but it merges so indefinitely
into the various other kinds that while Mr. Babington

1556

arid Mr. Borrer made seventeen distinct species alto-
gether, Mr. Benthain recognizes only five ; and other
authorities distinguish seven, nine, and thirteen respec-
tively. Here in the hedgerow grows a second sort, the
field-rose, with more trailing stems, paler white flowers,
and more globular fruit — besides the purely technical
character that all its styles are united together into a tall
projecting column, instead of issuing separately from a
little vent in the calyx. Scentless, the books usually
call it, too, though to me it has a distinct and pleasant
perfume, fainter than the dog-rose's, but undeniably real
and perceptible. This bush, however, merges by infini-
tesimal gradations into the true dog-rose, so that even
experienced botanists of the old dogmatic type cannot
always tell you to which of the two species they would
verbally assign a particular specimen. Each has his own
nostrum — his special point on which he relies in diagno-
sis ; and no two of them ever agree as to what it shall
be, nor can any of them give you a valid reason for pre-
ferring his private system to anybody else's.

Then, again, on the other side, the dog-rose merges
equally into the sweetbrier, for though it is usually
glandless, it has often a few small glands on the edge of
the leaflets to guard it from caterpillars or aphides ; and
tlese are scattered freely on the under side and the leaf-
stalks as well in the more typical sweetbriers. Yet the
truest sweetbrier of all is undoubtedly an artificial
human product, made by selecting the best or most
aromatic natural specimens and cultivating or breeding
from them under the most favorable circumstances.
Some botanists have divided even this into two species.

In a third direction, the dog-rose varies through its
hairier varieties toward the downy rose, with a prickly
fruit and a more erect bushy stem.

DOG-ROSE AND BRAMBLKS. 127

Lastly, the two or three shorten dwarf forms, with
numerous straight slender prickles, are variously lumped
together as burnet roses, or else divided into two or more
distinct species, according to the taste and fancy of the
observer. The names we choose to give them and the
lines we choose to draw are mere matters of human con-
venience in nomenclature : the one patent fact which all
close lookers can see for themselves is this — that through-
out the whole series every single character of stem, leaf,
bud, flower, fruit, or seed varies indefinitely, till the at-
tempt really to discriminate between the types becomes
practically impossible.

It is much the same with their neighbors the brambles.
Here, ordinary mortals have long since distinguished two
fairly marked types, because of their different berries ;
and when you get a difference in the berry you touch the
intelligence of mankind at once in one of its tenderest
and deepest susceptibilities. So these two species have
acquired colloquial names as blackberries and dewberries.
But in between them an indefinite number of links exist,
which can no more be separated from one another than
humanity could be separated into three distinct groups of
white-haired, black-haired, and red-haired people. On
the other hand, the so-called blackberry bushes differ so
much among themselves in less conspicuous organs that
they have been sometimes divided into from six to forty
species, and sometimes lumped together again into one.

In the older days of natural science our Dryasdusts
fought fiercely with one another over these questions of
specific identity or difference : nowadays, we are all
mostly agreed that such variations must naturally occur,
and that the attempt to reduce them all to artificial sym-
metry is as impossible as it is futile. In some cases
species are well marked off from one another, because

128 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

natural selection has fixed steadily upon certain very
distinctive or highly important features, and has exag-
gerated those to an extreme degree : and then the inter-
mediate forms soon die out, because crossing becomes
impracticable, and the central stock has ceased to exist.
In other cases species merge imperceptibly into one
another : so that all one can do is to accept certain ap-
proximate types as standards of reference, and consider
the intermediate forms as neutral specimens ; because
the central form still holds its own, and the various
lateral types, slightly favored by natural selection in
different directions, still remain capable of crossing with
one another — at least on their respective borders. To
this latter class such plants as the roses and the brambles
belong — as, indeed, do by far the larger number of our
native wild flowers. Indefinite variability and indeter-
minate boundaries are indeed the rule ; definiteness and
distinctness of limitation are but rare exceptions. The
primrose fades away into the oxlip. and the oxlip into
the cowslip : till at last even the bucolic inquirer is
forced to take refuge in the fundamental doctrine of
Hegelianism, and admit that after all in nature every A
is also a not-A.

XXIII.

SUNDEW AND BUTTEBWOBT.

SHOWERY August weather, with gleams of sunshine
interspersed, is just what the little blue butterwort best
loves : and coming out into the patch of bog above the
Home Fields to look for it this morning, I find its
strange spurred flowers out by dozens, among the mossy
bits where the undrained pools lie thick with red rusty
sediment between the tufted grassy islets, and the peat
yields like a saturated sponge beneath one's hesitating
feet. There is nothing wilder and more natural left in
England than these frequent oases of marshy ground,
dotted about through the great sheet of artificially
drained and cultivated farm-land that coders the plain or
the hillside ; and here alone one might compile a special
calendar from spring to autumn — a chronicle which
should note from day to day the budding of the rushes
and the sedges, the flowering of the flags and feather-
foils, the fruiting of bog-asphodels and great osmunda
ferns. Everywhere else, save on a few lonely moors or
heaths and barren mountain-tops, our true native flora
has been mostly killed off before the spread of tillage and
the steady march of those cultivated weeds which came
to us first from Western Asia, and which are now mak-
ing the tour of the world with English seed-wheat and
English clover. We can hardly say, indeed, what the
real English flowers of the plains were originally like ;
for some of them must now be quite extinct, and others
must have grown weedier and coarser to suit the new

130 COLIN" CLOUT'S OALEKDAK.

circumstances brought about by extended cultivation.
But here on the peaty hillside hollows, and in the unre-
claimed bogs, bits of which may be found almost every-
where, a totally different type of vegetation still abun-
dantly survives. Reedy tussocks of cotton-grass and bog-
rnsh rise in little islands from the level turf ; and in
between them the shallow water stagnates and reddens
in the hollows with the iron-mould of decaying leaves
and skeleton club-moss. These lower bits, beside the
trickling rills that slowly drain off the overflow from the
pools, are the favorite haunts of sundew and butterwort ;
and what gives them their special interest to the rural
mind is this — that here, side by side in treacherous
friendship, grow the two most ruthless and marvellous
among our English insect-eating plants.

Sundew, perhaps, is the best known to the world at
large of the two uncanny things, by name at any rate ; if
for no other reason, at least on account of Mr.
Swinburne's exquisite and musical lines ; the only entire
poem, 1 fancy, which he has ever devoted to any single
natural object ; for, in spite of his vague pantheistic
nature-worship, man, not nature, is the real centre round
which the eddy of his thoughts revolves. Here you
have an entire plant, lifted, root and all, from its moist
bed — as carious a herb to look at as any in the world ;
and indeed it is no wonder that so fantastic a creature
should have been the one weed to attract in passing our
wierdest poet's special attention. The leaves are round
and long-stalked, pressed flat in a tuft or rosette against
the ground, and rather red than green externally even at
a first casual glance. But when you look closer, you see
that the actual blade itself is more or less faintly green-
ish, and that the redness of its surface is due to a num-
ber of living and movable viscid hairs, each consisting

SUNDEW AND BUTTERWORT. 131

of a long neck, capped by a little globular crimson gland
as big as a pinhead. Some of the leaves have folded
over their edges or rolled in upon themselves ; and if
you open them you will find in the centre two or three
decaying carcasses of flies. Whenever the insect lights
upon the blade, attracted by the bright red glands with
their honey-like secretion, he gets clogged at once by the
sticky hairs, and cannot drag himself away from the cor-
rosive acid for all his frantic efforts. For my own part,
I cannot watch the poor creature struggling to free his
legs and wings from this horrible, impassive, blood-suck-
ing plant without at once assisting him out of his
trouble ; for my instincts will not allow me to appraise
the " divine dexterity" of nature in causing destruction
so highly as some of our idealistic humanitarians have
done ; it is impossible not to feel a little thrill of horror
at this battle between the sentient and the insentient,
where the insentient always wins — this combination of
seeming cunning and apparent hunger for blood on the
part of a rooted, inanimate plant against a breathing,
flying, conscious insect. But with a little bit of raw
beef one can see the whole process just as well, and far
less cruelly ; for after all, man shrinks from seeing what
unconscious nature does not shrink from designing with
minute prevision and care. As soon as the fragment of
meat is placed upon the leaf, the clubbed ends of the
glandular tentacles hold it fast by their sticky secretion,
and the other tentacles around bend over to enclose it,
exactly as the arms of a polyp sweep together to catch
their floating prey. If you put a dead innutritions ob-
ject on the blade, the glands bend over at first, but
shortly relax again ; when the object is a living fly, how-
ever, they clasp it tightly, and the more it struggles the
more it excites the surrounding tentacles to close over it

132 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

and hem it in securely. There it is gradually dissolved
and digested, its juices going to supply the plant with
materials for the production of its flower and seed.

The butterwort is a less savagely insectivorous creature
than the sundew ; yet its taste for fresh meat is almost
as indubitable as that of its cruel red-leaved neighbor.
Its foliage is pale hoary green, covered with little crys-
talline-looking white dots, which produce an abundant
viscid fluid, easily drawn out into long threads by the
touch of a finger. When an insect lights upon it, his
legs are clogged by the fluid ; and the edge of the leaf
then curls slowly inward, so as to push him into the
centre of the blade, where the digestive power seems to
be strongest. But what is most interesting of all about
thd butterwort is the fact that it is peculiarly adapted for
attracting insects from two distinct points of view — for
food, and as fertilizers. While it lays itself out to catch
and eat miscellaneous small flies with its gummy leaves,
it also lays itself out to allure bees with its comparatively
large and handsome blue mask-shaped flowers. It has a
deep spur behind each blossom, which secretes a big
drop of clear honey ; while its irregular shape is fitted
neatly to the bee?s body, its stamens are placed in the
right position to brush against his back as he enters the
tube, and its lip is covered with long club-shaped hairs
among which his bristly legs can get a firm and conven-
ient foothold. It is strange thus to see one and the same
plant bidding for the attentions of one insect race by
honest allurements of honey and color, while at the same
time it spreads a deadly trap for a second race with sticky
glands and dissolvent acid secretions.

Why should these two totally distinct plants, living
together in precisely similar circumstances, have acquired
this curious and ucannny habit of catching and devouring

SUNDEW AND BUTTEKWOET. 133

live flies ? Clearly, there must be some good reason for
the practice : the more so as all other insect- eating
plants — Venus's fly-traps, side-saddle flowers, pitcher-
plants, bladderworts, and so forth — are invariably deni-
zens of damp watery places, rooting as a rule in moist
moss or decaying loose vegetation. Now, in such situa-
tions it is difficult or impossible for them to obtain those
materials from the soil which are usually supplied by
constant relays of animal manure ; and under such cir-
cumstances, where the roots have no access to decaying
animal matter, those plants would flourish best which
most utilized every scrap of such matter that happened
to fall upon their open leaves. At first, we may feel
pretty sure, the leaves would only catch dead flies which
accidentally dropped upon their surface ; or they might
begin by being descended from slightly viscid ancestors,
which had acquired their stickiness to prevent ants and
other intruders from climbing up the stalk — an explana-
tion especially probable in the case of the sundew, seeing
that its parent form was almost certainly a saxifrage like
the common little London pride ; and these saxifrages are
all noticeable for their very sticky glandular stems and
dotted leaves. If any such plant, growing in peaty
spots, occasionally by mere accident caught flies, which
decayed on the surface of its leaves and so supplied it
with a little stock of manure, it would benefit by the
habit thus initiated ; and natural selection would tend to
increase and specialize that habit in the future. So
there would slowly be evolved the long glandular tenta-
cles, followed by the actual development of a true diges-
tive absorbent system, and at last of something closely
resembling a set of nerves, to enable the arms to close in
immediately upon the struggling prey.

Butterwort, on the other hand, began by being a sort

134 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

of distant cousin to the primroses ; but having been cast
into much the same sort of situation as sundew, it has
acquired in the end very similar habits ; while at the
same time it has also specialized itself in another direc-
tion for bee-fertilization, till its irregular blue flowers
now show hardly any trace of their primrose origin save
in some small points of internal structure, noticeable only
to an anatomical eye. The two plants strikingly exhibit
the strange results natural selection will often produce
where very exceptional circumstances make the neces-
saries of vegetable life much more difficult to procure
than in normal cases. Under such conditions, plants
frequently acquire tricks of structure and movement
which make them resemble conscious and intelligent
animate creatures to an almost incredible degree.

XXIV.

WHITE RABBITS AND WHITE HARES.

WALKING out in the undercliff by Tom Fowler's cot-
tage this afternoon, I have just come across a very un-
usual sight for an English warren. A snow-white wild
rabbit has started this moment, almost from under my
feet, and made straight for his burrow on the neighbor-
ing hillside. What is stranger still, he was a full-grown
buck, apparently ; and this is peculiar, because a rabbit
of such a conspicuous color is almost sure to get picked
off early in his life by prowling owls or passing badgers.
Indeed, that is just why wild rabbits as a rule possess
their well-known grayish-brown color. Such a color
harmonizes well with the dry bracken and low stubble
among which they feed ; and it thus renders the animals
as little conspicuous as possible to their numerous ene-
mies, especially in the dusk of evening, which is their
proper feeding time. Wild rabbits tend to vary in color
a little, just as tame ones do, though to a less degree ;
but the variations are dangerous to the creatures, because
they betray them more readily to their keen-eyed foes.
It is only where snow abounds that white rabbits or
white hares are likely to possess any advantage ; and
under such circumstances we do actually find a white
species in our own island.

On the tops of the higher Scotch hills, in fact, there
still linger on among the colder districts a few isolated
colonies of a very interesting little rodent, known lyy a
large and puzzling array of aliases — as the white hare,

130 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

the varying hare, the Alpine hare, and the blue hare of
Scotland. In size it stands about midway between the
common hare and the rabbit ; but it differs greatly from
both in color, general appearance, and instinctive habits.
Throughout the summer months the blue hare is clad in
a suit of tawny gray fur, with a slight admixture of longer
black hairs ; and as it runs, the shifting lights upon its
back and sides produce a faintly bluish effect to the eye,
which has gained for it perhaps the commonest among
its numerous popular names. In winter, however, it
changes color, like the ptarmigan and most other sub-
arctic species — becoming snow-white all over, except the
very tips of its ears, which still remain a lustrous black.
It does not burrow nor make a form, but shelters itself
in natural crannies of the rock : in this respect agreeing
rather with the more primitive and central group of
rodents, and exhibiting less specialization of instinct than
either the common hare or the rabbit, which have clearly
acquired more developed habits in accordance with their
long practice of dwelling among the great open temper-
ate plains most affected by man and by the hunting car-
nivores— dogs, wolves, ferrets, stoats, and weasles.

The interest attaching to the blue hare is somewhat
akin to that which attaches to the red grouse, as involv-
ing a curious problem in geographical distribution. Bat
the cases may be regarded as to some extent the converse
of one another ; for, while the red grouse is altogether
peculiar to Britain, the blue hare is found in scattered
and isolated colonies over a wide extent of Europe and
Asia. It turns up again, essentially the same, in the
Swiss Alps, in Scandinavia, in Russian Lapland, in
Siberia, and in Kamtchatka. At present the Alpine and
Scotch colonies at least are separated from the central
mainguard of the species in the sub-arctic regions by wide

WHITE RABBITS AND WHITE HARES. 13?

intervening seas or plains, across which they are never
reinforced by stray fresh arrivals of solitary individuals.
The blue hare thus exhibits on the whole the perma-
nence of species under identical conditions, as the red
grouse and the willow grouse exhibit the tendency
toward variability in species where the conditions have
become more or less dissimilar.

We now know pretty accurately how these little isolat-
ed colonies got stranded so far apart from one another
on the tops of the hillier regions or in the colder parts
of the Eurasiatic continent. During the pleistocene
period, before and between the recurrent glacial epochs,
the ancestors of the blue hare spread over the whole
central plain of Europe, which was then cold enough to
suit their peculiar tastes ; and their bones, essentially
identical with those of the existing individuals, are
found in cave deposits of pleistocene date as far south as
the Swabian grottos. At that time they ranged over
the chilly lowlands of Belgium, Germany, and the North
Sea, in company with the reindeer, the arctic fox, the
musk sheep, and the lemming, which have now been
driven back "again to the snow-bound regions of the
north ; as well as with the Alpine marmot, the chamois,
and the ibex, which at present inhabit only the higher
ranges of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Sierra Nevada, or
the Caucasus. There they were hunted by the men of
the earlier. stone period, who used only weapons of chip-
ped flint, unground and unpolished, and who lived for
the most part in the limestone caverns now filled in by
later accumulations.

As the climate grew warmer, however, after the
clearing away of the ice, the temperate fauna began once
more to replace the arctic or sub-arctic kinds in Britain
and Germany. The cold period when these northern

138 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

species ranged over the whole central belt of Europe
corresponds roughly with the age of the palaeolithic
cave-men ; with the post-glacial neolithic or prehistoric
age we find a gradual and continuous retreat northward
of the animals adapted to colder habitats. In the earlier
neolithic days the moose and the reindeer were still
found as far south as Yorkshire ; by the dawn of the
historical period they were extinct in England, though
the Scandinavian jarls of Orkney still hunted reindeer
among the straths of Caithness as late as the middle of
the twelfth century. During the first period, too, both
the blue hare and the common hare ranged together over
the plains of England ; but as time went on and the
climate became milder the northern species retreated to
the Scotch hills, where it found a more congenial atmos-
phere, leaving the southern plains and valleys entirely to
the occupation of its ruddy ally. In the same way the
blue hares of Germany also became extinct ; and so the
species was reduced to three isolated groups — one in
Scotland, one in Switzerland, and one large connected
body in northern Europe and Siberia. Here for the
most part the conditions remained so similar that the
various animals underwent no material differentiation :
though they vary slightly from place to place in the de-
gree to which they retain the habit of turning white in
winter.

In those countries where the snow lies long on the
ground they keep up the change of coat as a protection
against their enemies, natural selection effectually cutting
off any specimen which varies toward brown or black at
that season ; and here the stoats also for the most part
assume the white ermine dress in winter, so as to come
upon them unawares. The black tips to the ears doubt-
less serve to guide the leverets in following their dams

WHITE RABBITS AND WHITE HAKES. 139

across the snow, without being so conspicuous as to
betray the animal to its enemies from a little distance.
On the other hand, in northern Siberia, where snow lies
almost all the year round, the blue hare has a perma-
nently white coat ; but in southern Russia it hardly
alters in hue, except on the back and sides.

The Irish hare is regarded by competent authorities as
a variety of the blue hare, produced under the excep-
tionally favorable circumstances of a very warm insular
habitat, combined with freedom from competition. In
America the closely similar species — locally called the
rabbit — accommodates itself in much the same way to
the different zones of climate — being white in winter in
the north, and yellowish-brown all the year round in the
middle and southern States. In this case the two varie-
ties mix so much in the uninterrupted land-surface
between the Arctic regions and the Gulf of Mexico that
they could not readily grow into distinct species. Bat
in the case of the red grouse of Britain and the willow
grouse of Scandinavia such a change has been facilitated
by absence of interbreeding ; and in the case of the Irish
hare we get a similar change, now actually in course of
operation. There is reason to believe that in America a
glacial species has spread over the whole country, for
even the southern forms undergo a slight winter change
of coat ; whereas in Europe the return of an exiled tem-
perate species after the retreat of the ice has driven the
glacial kind steadily northward, or isolated it among the
colder heights of Scotland and Switzerland. It is worthy
of observation that where the hares change color in
winter the stoats also usually assume their ermine dress,
but where the hares remain of one hue throughout the
year the stoats for the most part follow suit under the
influence of identical conditions.

XXV.

THISTLEDOWN BLOWS.

IN spite of much unseasonable rain, the corn in the
Home Close still looks promising enough ; and if we
only get a little overdue sunshine for the ripening of the
grain, we may yet save a decent harvest this critical
summer. But the field is full of thistles, as it always is ;
and nothing one can do seems to be of much good in
eradicating them. The down continually blows over
from Shapwick Grange, the next farm, as it is now
doing indeed at this very moment ; and so long as the
Shapwick people go on neglecting their Further Croft,
there is no chance of our Home Close getting really
clear of the troublesome intruders.

Nature, indeed, has been very prodigal to thistles ;
she has given them every advantage and no enemies on
earth, except farmers and donkeys. Just look at such a
head as this that I have cut off clean with a swish of my
stick, and then consider what fraction of a chance the
wheat or the wheat-growers have got against it. Each
stalk supports some dozen heads of blossom at least ; and
each head contains a hundred separate flowers, every one
of them destined to produce in due time a winged and
tufted seed. The thistles are members of the great com-
posite family, like the daisies and the dandelions ; and
they have their little bells clustered together after the
common composite fashion into close and compact flower-
heads. If you cut the head through with your knife,
longitudinally — it is difficult to tear it open because of

THISTLEDOWN BLOWS. 141

the prickly tips to the bracts — you will see that it is
made up of innumerable distinct purple florets : each
with five petals united into a long deep tube, and each
with a little seed-like fruit at the bottom, crowned by a
ring of hairs (the future thistledown), which are in fact
the altered and modified relics of the original calyx.
Even in its simplest form, the composite flower bears
marks of being an extremely developed floral type ; and
the thistle, though relatively simple, is very far from
being the simplest among the composite plants. A
glance at the past history of the race will show why it
now proves so persistent and noxious an enemy to us
agriculturists. It is one of the most highly evolved and
successful of living plants ; and it pits itself against the
relatively simple and sickly wheat — an artificial plant
with a feeble constitution, which we ourselves have sed-
ulously created for our own special use. The natural
consequence is that if we did not give every advantage
to the wheat and put every obstacle we can in the way
of the thistles, they would live it down in a single de-
cade ; as European weeds are living down the native
weeds of New Zealand, or as English vermin are living
down the aboriginal marsupials of isolated Australia.

The primitive ancestral composite — to go no further
back in its history than that — was already a very ad-
vanced sort of plant, with a number of little tubular
blossoms, like miniature Canterbury bells, crowded
together compactly into a clustered many-flowered head.
Its petals were probably purple, and its calyx had even
then assumed the form of long floating hairs to the ripe
seed. But at an early stage of their life as composites,
the group broke up into three minor tribes, from which
are severally descended the daisies, the dandelions, and
the thistles ; for under one or other of those general

142 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

s

heads tlie many thousand known species may be roughly
classified. The daisy tribe, as we all know, took to
producing mostly yellow florets, with white or pink
outer rays, to allure their special insect allies. The dan-
delion tribe turned all its florets throughout the entire
Iiead into long rays, like the external row in the daisies,
and colored them uniformly yellow throughout, on
behalf of the little yellow-loving flies by whom its seeds
are usually fertilized. But the thistles, the central
tribe of all, retained more simply the original habits of the
race, in that all their florets are still tubular, instead of
being split out into strap-shaped rays ; while the vast
majority of them keep as yet to the primitive purple
tinctures of their race, which specially endear them to
the higher insects. Bees are the chief fertilizers of
thistle-heads ; but butterflies also frequently pay them a
visit ; and in the Home Close at the present moment
they are being attended by thousands of little black and
red burnet moths, which prefer the long bell -shaped
blossoms even to that favorite flower with them, the
bird's-foot trefoil. Almost every head in the field is
covered by half a dozen moths at once, all drinking
nectar from the recesses of the deep long tube, and all
unconsciously carrying pollen from stem to stem on their
uncoiled proboscis.

But even after the thistle tribe had separated from its
sister-composites of the daisy and dandelion groups, it wap
far from having reached the fully developed thistly
type. The lower members of the tribe have no prickles,
and some of them are very simple unarmed weeds in-
deed. The common sawwort, which abounds in copses
and hangers in the south of England, represents the
first rough draft of a thistle in this nascent condition.
To look at, it is very thistle-like indeed, especially in its

THISTLEDOWN BLOWS. 143

purple flower heads, closely surrounded by a set ef tight
but not prickly bracts. Living, as it does, in bushy
places, however, where cattle seldom penetrate, it has
not felt the need of protective defences ; and so it has
not been ousted from its own special haunts by the later
and more highly developed true thistles, which are by
origin weeds of the open grass-clad lowlands, evolved
under stress of damage from herbivorous animals. But
where cows and horses abound, or still earlier where deer
and antelopes are common, the defenceless sawwort
would have little chance ; and under such circumstances
only the harder and stringier plants, or those which
showed some tendency to produce protective spines and
bristles, could hope for success in the struggle for exist-
ence. Thus there has arisen a natural tendency in the
level plains to favor all weeds so protected ; and as a
matter of fact the vast majority of open lowland weeds
at the present day do actually possess some protective
device of stings, harsh hairs, prickles, or spines, or else
are very stringy or very nauseous to the taste. Our ob-
ject as cultivators is generally to keep down these
natively well-endowed races, in favor of the softer
grasses and clovers, which we are obliged artificially to
fence in and protect with all possible precautions. But
even so, in spite of all our endeavors to expel nature
with our civilized pitchfork, " tamen usque recurrit."

The thistle that is overruning the Home Close ranks,
indeed, among the best adapted and most successful of
its kind ; which is only the converse way of saying that
it is a most troublesome and ineradicable weed. Creep-
ing-thistle, we call it, from its peculiar habits ; for, be-
sides its open mode of propagation by its floating seeds,
it has a sneaking trick of spreading underground by its
ouried rootstock, which sends up fresh stems every year

144 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

from the joints or nodes. It is the commonest of all its
race- -not in England only, but throughout the globe ;
for its winged fruits have been carried to every quarter
of the world with seed-corn and clovers. Cut it down,
and a new head springs from below the wound ; hack it
close to the ground, and the rootstock pushes out a fresh
young shoot from an unsuspected corner ; harrow it up
bodily, and the seed blows over at harvest-time from all
the surrounding fields, just at the right moment for the
autumn ploughing.

For hardiness of constitution it has no equal ; and this
is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that universal cross-
fertilization has become absolutely certain by the separa-
tion of the sexes on different plants. This globular head
that I have just swished off has none but stamen-bearing
florets ; this other more conical cluster, that I am trying
to cut with the aid of my knife and handkerchief, con-
tains nothing, on the contrary, but pistils and seeds.
Such careful separation of the two elements perfectly
insures a good cross in each generation, and so greatly
improves the quality of the strain. Add that every stem
produces some thirty or forty heads, each containing
more than a hundred florets, with winged seeds that fly
about everywhere, and can you wonder that thistles are
so plentiful ? Even the less developed types, like the
melancholy thistle of the Highlands — so called from its
gracefully nodding or drooping head — get on well enough,
though that particular species differs from all others in
not being prickly, and depends for its defence entirely on
its stringy nature. Centaury and corn-bluebottle, too,
are others of the same tribe, which have differentiated
themselves in less unpleasant ways than the true thistles ;
while the common burdock has turned the prickles on
its head into small clinging hooks, which help to disperse

THISTLEDOWH BLOWS. 145

the seeds in a somewhat different manner, by clinging
to the legs of animals ; and it is a significant fact that
the burdocks are most essentially wayside weeds of the
waste places in cultivated lands. But in its own particu-
lar group — that is to say, among the purple central com-
posites— the creeping thistle in the Home Close is cer-
tainly the highest existing product of vegetable evolu-
tion ; and that is what makes me bestow upon it, after
all, a certain extorted meed of grudging admiration. It
lays itself out to be troublesome, and it succeeds to per-
fection.

XXVI.

SCAELET GERANIUMS.

WE have such a show of many-colored pelargoniums
in our little cottage-garden at this moment as would put
to shame, I verily believe, any modern bedded-out par-
terre in all England. For, indeed, I will frankly con-
fess to an old-fashioned love for natural old-fashioned
flowers, undistorted by the florist's art ; instead of those
stiff,, overgrown, unsymmetrical bosses of irregular leaves
which nursery-gardeners nowadays display with so much
pride to admiring connoisseurs as splendid double varie-
ties. The doubling is, of course, produced, for the most
part, by converting the central stamens into shapeless
petals, and so destroying the native symmetry and archi-
tectural ground-plan of the original flower. - If you look
into a real natural blossom, you see in it always a definite
and beautiful scheme, which centres on the truly essen-
tial parts — the stamens and pistils ; but if you look into
a double rose, or, still worse, a double geranium, you see
nothing but a confused mass of wrinkled and amorphous
petals, without any distinct central point or any consis-
tent harmony of plan. It may be true, as Polixenes says
to Perdita, that though " this is an art which does mend
nature," yet " nature is made better by no mean, but
nature makes that mean ;" still, she makes it merely, as
it seems to me, by way of disease or disorganization ;
and I go rather with Perdita (as Shakespeare himself
clearly did) in declaring " I'll not put the dibble in the
earth to set one slip of them." No : our cottage-garden

SCARLET GERANIUMS. 147

does well enough with the old hardy perennials and
annuals, the mints and marjoram, the daffodils and vio-
lets, the lilies and oxlips of our English poetry ; it will
not away with your modern gloxinias and echeverias, and
heaven only knows what other new-fangled things, called
by doubtfully classical names unlovelier than themselves.

Among all our old-fashioned garden flowers, not one
is brighter or prettier than these common pelargoniums
from the Cape which we all know familiarly as scarlet
geraniums. They are not exactly of the genuine botani-
cal geranium type, it is true ; but they are quite near
enough to it for even unlearned eyes to perceive imme-
diately the close relationship between them. I suppose
everybody knows the little wild herb-robert of our Eng-
lish roadsides — its pretty lace-like foliage turns so bright
a red on dry walls or sandy hedge-banks, that even the
most casual passer-by can hardly fail to have learned
its name. Herb-robert is the true geranium ; and it has
many familiar allies in Britain and in the rest of Europe,
including that large and brilliant kind the blood gera-
nium which stars the limestone rocks of the Mediterra-
nean and the Atlantic shores, from Sorrento and Cadiz
to our -own Cornish, "Welsh, and Cumbrian cliffs.

The ordinary scarlet garden pelargonium is descended
. from a very similar type ; and yet though it is so com-
mon and so well known a plant, it has some strange
peculiarities of structure which escape the notice of
ninety-nine out of a hundred among those who have seen
it familiarly in their gardens or their vases from child-
hood upward. Pick a truss of the bright red blossoms
from the plant — we have no despotic gardener here to
frown at us for meddling with our own belongings — and
then nip off a single flower from the head, close to the
point where the clustered bundle joins tha main stem.

148 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

Perhaps you hav§ never observed before that the single
flower-stalks are each slightly humpbacked : there is a
sort of knob on the stalk about a quarter of an inch
above the junction with the stem ; and from that knob
upward the stalk grows twice as thick as below. Again,
look at the flower full in front, and you will observe,
what perhaps has hitherto escaped your notice, that all
five petals are not equal and similar, but that the blossom
is bilateral instead of radially symmetrical ; it has two
upper petals distinctly different in shape from the three
lower ones. The upper pair are narrower, and stand on
rather long claws ; the lower trio are broader, and have
no claw. Now, pull off the two upper petals, and you
will see that behind them there lies a deep pouch or
tube, running along the top of the flower-stalk as far as
the knob. Cut the stalk across, and you will find it
hollow on the top ; cut it down lengthwise, and, if you
follow up the pouch throughout its whole length, you
will learn that it leads at last to a drop of honey, secreted
in the furthest recesses of the knob. To put it shortly,
what seems the flower- stalk is really a stalk and a nectar-
bearing spur run into one. How this has happened, and
why it has happened, one can easily understand by the
analogy of this other old-fashioned garden flower, the
common nasturtium or Indian cress.

In the nasturtium, you see at once that the upper
lobe of the calyx is prolonged behind into a deep and
pointed spur ; and you have probably bitten off one of
these spurs at some time or other and have found that it
contained a large supply of rather pungent but very
luscious honey. At least, it seems pungent to our
clumsy taste, because we have to cut or bruise the tissues
of the plant in order to get at it. Now, if you bend
back the spur of the nasturtium so as to make it touch

SCARLET GERANIUMS. 149

the flower-stalk, you have artificially imitated the ar-
rangement in the scarlet geranium ; only that in the
geranium the two parts have actually coalesced, for a
reason which I shall try to explain a little later. First,
however, let us see how the scarlet pelargonium itself
got developed out of a primitive ancestor, something
like our own little pink herb-robert. A technical book
of botany will tell you, after its dogmatic fashion, that
the genus geranium is distinguished from the genus
pelargonium by these marks or differentiating peculiari-
ties : the geraniums have regular flowers, ten stamens,
and five honey-bearing glands on the disk, and they are
natives of almost all temperate climates, northern or
southern ; the pelargoniums have irregular flowers, with
two upper petals different from the remainder, a spurred
honey- bearing pouch to the calyx, no glands on the disk,
and only about five stamens instead of ten, and they are
confined (in their wild state) to the Cape of Good Hope
and a few neighboring regions.

Now all these facts are very significant : they show
that the pelargoniums are a highly evolved and special-
ized race, produced under peculiar circumstances in a
limited tract of country. We know that the competition
between flowers for the visits of fertilizing insects is par-
ticularly fierce in South Africa ; because from no other
district do we get so large a number of our most con-
spicuous garden blossoms ; and wherever such strong
competition exists, as among the higher Alps and in the
Arctic regions, where bees are almost unknown, and
butterflies are rare, only the most brilliant and attractive
flowers of all succeed in getting fertilized. Under these
circumstances, the native geraniums of South Africa
have been compelled to specialize themselves into the
highly peculiar pelargonium form ; or, to put it more

150 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

correct! y, only those which did so have ultimately sur-
vived.

Instead of having five honey -glands on an open disk,
which any small insects could easily thieve, the pelargo-
niums have secreted all their honey in one depression,
which has grown longer and longer till at length it has
assumed the shape of a deep pouch. This, on the one
hand, has made it accessible only to insects with a very
long proboscis ; while, on the other hand, it has simulta-
neously enabled the flower to make more sure of proper
fertilization, and so to dispense with half its original com-
plement of stamens. The sensitive surface of the pistil
now turns down to meet the pollen on the insect's head,
as it poises on level wings before the deep nectary ; and
this surface itself consists of five spreading fingers, cov-
ered (under a slight magnifying power) with beautiful
crystalline glands to which the pollen readily adheres.
The irregularity in the petals follows as a guide to the
insect ; the upper pair being slightly raised on claws in
order to let him get more easily at the mouth of the
tube. In the common scarlet species all the petals are
colored much alike ; but in these rarer kinds that grow
by its side the irregularity is much more marked ; for
the lower three are uniform in hue, while the upper pair
are striped with darker lines, which lead straight to the
opening of the nectary, thus acting as regular honey-
guides.

Much the same thing happens in the nasturtium ;
which, however, is far more remotely allied to the true
geraniums, and which probably arrived at its own similar
arrangement by a distinct line of evolution. Whether
the honey-tube of the pelargonium was once separate
from the stalk, as that of the nasturtium still is, and
whether it afterward coalesced with it, it would be diffi-

SCARLET GERANIUMS. 151

cult to decide. Certainly there would be a slight gain
in the latter plan, as I have often seen humble-bees un-
able to get at the honey of the nasturtium in a lawful
fashion owing to the length of the tube (which is not
well adapted to any British insect), feloniously appro-
priate it by biting through the side — in which case, of
course, they cannot benefit the plant, as they do not
touch the pollen or fertilize the seeds ; while I have
never observed anything of the sort happen in a pelargo-
nium, where the honey is much better concealed. It is
more likely, however, that the spur in this last instance
has really grown out of a slight depression along the
footstalk ; and, if so, it can never have been a single
separate organ.

XXYII.

RAIN ON THE ROOT CROPS.

HERE in the country we are really beginning at last to
lose heart altogether. Night after night we see the
leaden mists gathering ominously over Pilbury-hill ; and
morning after morning we see a fallacious gleam of sun-
shine or two peeping through the lattice at five o'clock,
only to find the whole sky overcast again and heavy
showers pattering steadily against the window-panes an
hour before breakfast- time. Never was there such a
diluvial summer. Sometimes for a couple of days at
once we get a little respite, with nothing more serious
than occasional downpours from a passing white fleece
that drifts island -like before the wind through a sea of
blue ; and then the deceptive barometer struggles slowly
upward with every promise of settled weather. But just
as the mercury and our spirits rise half-way to 30,
another squadron of black rain-clouds comes careering
to us across the Atlantic, till the glass and the farmer's
heart sink down together gloomily to " very stormy."

To-day is just as bad as any of its predecessors. It is
now a fall month since we carried our hay in the lower
croft, and still to this moment we have not been able to
put a scythe into the high meadow on the top of War-
down ; nor do I see any chance of mowing up there as
long as' those big dark shadows continue to chase one
another with such cruelly heedless merriment across the
broad sloping flank of Pilbury. The corn in the Home
Close ought now to be filling out in ear under a genial

RAIN ON THE ROOT CROPS. 153

flood of sunshine ; instead of which, constant rain is
turning the field into a fine crop of golden charlock ;
while as to the turnips, they bid fair soon to afford excel-
lent corer for wild duck, which could be most conven-
iently and satisfactorily shot, American fashion, from a
shallow punt along the furrows. In such weather as
this it is good to be a philosopher ; and one may at least
reflect with pleasure that crops which are spoiled for all
practical purposes are still quite good enough to philoso-
phize upon.

Indeed, from the biological point of view, even the
rain is not without a certain mournful interest of its
own. Turnips differ very little in their origin from
charlock ; and there is nothing on earth that charlock
loves so much as a wet summer. But, then, charlock is
not anxious for fresh material to store up in its root-stock
for the flowering season, like the swedes and turnips.
The difference all lies in the fact that the weed is an
annual, while the plant from which we get our cultivated
roots has been practically converted under our hands into
a sort of irregular biennial. There' is a wonderfully close
similarity between almost all these cabbage-like plants
in the wild state, and they illustrate beautifully the nat-
ural limitations of man's selective agency in producing
artificial varieties. Charlock is a capital typical example
of the race ; for it is perhaps one of the simplest and
earliest forms now surviving, and the least differentiated
in any one special direction. It is not a true native, but
comes to us, like so many other weeds of cultivation,
from those Routh European lands through which most
of our fruits and cereals passed on their westward way
from Central Asia.

Now, in charlock there is no natural quality which
makes it worth man's while to subject it to tillage or

154 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

artificial selection. Its leaves are rough, coarse, and
hairy, so it will not serve for the basis of a potherb ; its
stem is hard and stringy, so it will not serve for the basis
of a succulent vegetable like sea-kale or asparagus ; its
seeds are small and ill supplied with starches or food-
stuffs, so it will not serve for the basis of a grain or
pulse ; its root is harsh, and rapidly tapering into nu-
merous subdivisions, so it will not serve for the basis of
a swede or a turnip. Even its flowers, though gay and
bright enough, are too straggling and fugacious to make
them worth cultivating for ornamental purposes ; while
its fibres are not fine or long enough to twist into a good
rope ; and therefore the charlock is probably condemned
to remain to the end of its existence nothing more than
a mere field weed, hated by all farmers, and rooted out
mercilessly as a dangerous competitor to the pampered
corn crops.

Most of the cabbage tribe present, on the whole, very
much the same general characteristics ; and there are,
accordingly, certain fixed limitations in their possible
uses which can seldom or never be overcome. So far as
I know, not a single one of the cabbages, or of the
whole crucifer tribe to which they belong, ever yields
an edible seed ; and in this they contrast strongly with
the grasses and the pea-flowers, which supply us with
almost all our principal grains and food-stuffs. The
reason is that the crucifers have never learned to lay up
a separate store of albumen beside the seed-leaves of
their embryo, nor even to fill the seed-leaves themselves
with starches to maintain the young plant in the earlier
stages of its struggling existence. On the other hand,
those cabbageworts which deviate slightly from the cen-
tral charlock type may be utilized in certain other ways,
in accordance with the nature of the deviation. Here,

BAIN" (W THE EOOT CROPS. 155

for example, growing on the edge of the turnip-field, is
the undoubted wild ancestor of the turnips themselves —
the meadow navew. Its leaves are still rough and
hairy, so we can do little with them in the way of greens,
though when young and tender they are not unpleasant,
with their slightly bitter spinach flavor ; but its root is
larger and rounder than that of the charlock ; and here
the primitive husbandman shrewdly saw his practical
chance of an edible vegetable. By neglecting leaves or
seeds, and selecting the most favorable variations in the
root, he at last succeeded in producing a modified turnip,
from which later agriculturists have again developed the
still larger, coarser, and rounder swedes. Moreover,
though the seeds are but small and poor, they contain a
considerable proportion of oil ; and by concentrating
attention on this peculiarity, to the neglect of all others,
we have managed also to evolve independently from the
same parent stock another variety, the rape-seed, from
which we express colza oil. Each of these plants re-
mains exactly alike in foliage and flowers, because we
have expended no selective action upon those points ;
but in the parts on which selection has been infinitely
exercised they differ widely from one another, and from
the parent wild navew whose peculiarities already con-
tained them all potentially in the germ. To this day,
either turnips or beets which " break," as we call it —
that is to say, which flower at the natural period —
become small and shrunken ; because the original store
of food-stuffs was laid by in the root for the flowering
season ; and when the blossoms come out the plant has
practically reverted to its primitive condition. Similarly
with the cabbage : we have here adopted a closely
related variety — one can hardly call it a species, the two
axe so much alike — with smooth thickish foliage and a

156 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

perennial stock ; and while its flowers, roots, and seeds
remain unaltered, we have diverted its leaves into a solid
head, and produced from them the various cabbages and
curly kales of our gardeners. On the other hand, when
we choose to fix ourselves upon the blossoms alone, we
make (or rather continuously select) a diseased form
with overfed abortive buds, which gives us from the self-
same stock our cauliflowers and broccoli. So one can
readily see wrhy the rain which suits the narrow fibrous
rootlets of the charlock, and does not hurt even the sim-
ple wild navew, rots and destroys the big artificially
plimmed-out taproot of our cultivated turnips.

The other crucifers less closly related to the true cab-
bages exemplify the same principle even more widely,
and cast much interesting side-light on the strong and
weak points of the analogy between man's conscious
selective action and the unconscious preference of nature
for the best adapted varieties. Scurvy-grass is a crucifer
somewhat more advanced in type than the cabbageworts,
in that its flowers are white instead of yellow ; and from
one of its more distant south-eastern relatives we have
adopted our own horseradish, whose pungent root,
favored and preserved in the natural order of things
because of the protection it afforded the plant against
gnawing animals, has been utilized by ourselves for the
sake of its value as a relish in small quantities to our
more jaded palates. In the water-cress and other
cresses, which are also members of the same group, we
are similarly attracted by the very essences which were
meant to deter the animate creation ; though in this
case we ourselves do not care for them except when the
plants are very young and tender. Sea-kale, again, is a
maritime Devonshire weed, introduced into our gardens
during the last century ; and here the portion of the

EAI3ST ON THE ROOT CROPS. 157

plant we eat consists of the succulent slioots which force
their way up through the sand in spring, and which we
intentionally lengthen out and blanch by the device of
artificial banking. Gardeners say that it flourishes best
even now when surrounded by its natural element — sand
from the sea-shore. The origin of our radish is not known
with certainty, though it probably represents an improv-
ed southern variety of the jointed charlock that grows by
road-sides in many parts of England.

All these are purely useful variations on the one primi-
tive theme ; but there are some other crucifers whose
flowers have been developed into a higher state of per-
fection by insect selection, and many of these supply us
with a groundwork for ornamental garden blossoms.
Simplest among them are the little white alyssum, with
its sweet honey perfume, and the queer one-sided candy-
tufts of old-fashioned gardens, whose two outer petals
have grown longer and broader than the two inner ones,
so as to present a larger total attractive surface, thus
clearly bearing witness on their very faces to the inter-
vention of insect agency. Even higher in this respect
are the stocks and gillyflowers, whose petals are raised
on long claws, so as to form a tube for the preservation
of the honey from minor flies and beetles. These and a
vast number of other garden plants or wild weeds are all
shown by their common points of structure to be de-
scended from a single original ancestor ; and the peculi-
arities which natural selection has stamped upon them
have in many cases been further developed or exagger-
ated by the action of man. In fact it would almost seem
as though we had but to set an ideal before our eyes,
and then by constant selection to bring it about bodily in
the sphere of concrete reality. On the other hand,
wherever the natural tendencies exist we may produce

158 OOLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

very like effects in the most widely different families.
Thus the carrot does not belong to the same group as the
turnips at all, but is a similar highly evolved root of the
extremely unlike parsley and chervil tribe ; while the
beet and mangel-wurzel are equally remote by ancestry,
being artificial products from the goosefoot and spinach
line of descent.

XXVIII.

HOPS BLOSSOM.

How infinitely various and wonderful is Nature !
Every day her chronicler has something fresh to relate,
and every day he has to make his choice between a
thousand equal and conflicting claims. To-day the bees
are at their annual massacre of the drones ; and as I
passed the hive I saw them busy at that unnatural orgy
which leaves human noyades and fusillades far behind in
ingrained ferocity, were it only by its measured and in-
stinctive character. To-day the first teasel of the season
opens its buds, and the insects by the orchard are all
agog accordingly, crowding with an inquiring proboscis
around the serried bayonets that guard its heads of
bloom. To-day the fleabane expands its rays ; to-day
the water- plantain bursts into pinky- white blossom by the
river-side ; to-day the wild clematis begins to drape the
hedgerow with its long festoons of clustered flowers.
To-day, too, we get the first distant reminder of coming
autumn ; for I see the oats are beginning to mellow ;
and the swifts, far earliest of our migatory birds to wing
their way southward, have already deserted their nests
under the eaves of the church, where, like ardent ecclesi-
ologists that they are, they love best to fix their summer
quarters. They left us but yesterday, and by this time
they are doubtless calmly taking a bird's-eye view of
affairs at Alexandria. But, perhaps, of all the events
that mark this morning in the rural calendar, the most
practically important to man is the blossoming of the

160 OOLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

hops. Passing the bines on my way down to the river
— trout are rising well in the shade this week — I notice
that the young cones have now just opened, and that the
little green flowers are now fully expanded in good time
for an early harvest. The fly that threatened such evil
things a few weeks ago disappeared suddenly with the
wet weather ; and now, if all goes well, the hops at least
may prove a successful vintage amid all the failures of
this disastrous year. With tine weather in future, we
may perhaps hope to begin picking by the last days of
August.

No plant grown for economical purposes is more
graceful and beautiful in its mode of growth than the
hop. It stands alone among the nettle tribe in its twin-
ing habit ; and, indeed, it has diverged so widely from
all the rest of its kin, in pursuance of this abnormal
trick, that it now occupies a special genus all to itself ;
in other words, it has broken so completely with its an-
cestral type that no intermediate links at present remain
to connect it directly with its nearest congeners. Noth-
ing could be more unlike at first sight than a lissom
creeper such as the hop, and a stiff erect roadside weed
such as the stinging-nettle. Yet both are immediately
descended, at no great distance of time, from a single
common progenitor ; and both retain in a very marked
degree all the most distinctive features of underlying
structure which they inherit together from their similar
ancestry. The flowers are almost identical in hops and
nettles, as well as in their yet humbler ally the pellitory
— Solomon's "hyssop that springeth out of the wall,"
whose English name is a mere corruption of parietaria,
just as pilgrim is of peregrinus. In all three the male
and female blossoms are distinct. In all three they con-
sist > among the males at least, of four or five green

HOPS BLOSSOM. 161

leaflets, inclosing an equal number of elastic stamens.
Contrary to the usual rule in flowers, the stamens are ar-
ranged opposite to the calyx scales, instead of alternately
with them — a fact which shows that a row of petals, once
intermediate between stamens and calyx, has been sup-
pressed by disuse, owing to the acquisition by the flowers
of the habit of wind-fertilization. For, normally speak-
ing, all the successive rows in flowers are arranged al-
ternately with one another, as anybody may see in a
moment by looking at a fuchsia or a strawberry blossom ;
but when the petals are lost through change of habit the
other whorls appear to stand opposite to one another,
though the real nature of their arrangement is always
preserved for us in intermediate forms, with very small
petals, which are occasionally entirely wanting. By
these and numerous other minute agreements in points
of structure, the nettles, hops, and pellitories are all seen
to be descendants of a single common ancestor, which
had already lost its petals and had separated its sexes in
different flowers, but had not yet, of course, acquired
any of the special chracteristics that mark off the nettles,
the hops, and the pellitories from one another.

On the other hand, the hop itself must very early
have begun its own special differentiation from this old
central generalized form ; or else it would not now
exhibit so many points of minute adaptation to its own
peculiar habitat, nor would it be so distinctly marked
off from its other divergent relatives on either side.
While all of the nettles are mere soft herbs, and most of
the pellitories are slightly shrubby weeds, the hop has
acquired the habit of producing a stout perennial root-
stock ; from which each spring it sends up wonderfully
long annual stems, that climb to an immense height over
the poles in cultivation or over bushes and thickets in

163 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

the wild state, dying down again entirely with the ap-
proach of winter. I know nothing more marvellous in
the way of growth than the rapidity with which these
lithe bines curl spirally up the bare poles in early
summer — at first on the strength of material laid by in
their buried root-stocks, but afterward by the rapid as-
similation of aerial food from the surrounding atmos-
phere. As one watches the slender young sprays and
the graceful five-lobed heart-shaped leaves, rendered so
singularly like those of the wholly unconnected grape-
vine by exact similarity of situation and function, one
can almost see them with the eye of scientific faith
drinking in the carbon visibly from the air around by
the numerous thirsty pores on their under surface.

Everything here has been obviously designed for the
climbing habit. The rough hairs which in the nettle
serve as glandular reservoirs for a deterrent poison are
transformed in the hop, by a thickening of their base,
into recurved prickles, which serve as hooks to aid the
plant in hanging to the poles, or rather, in the wild
state, in clambering over small trees and hedgerows ; for
of course the original evolving bines could never have
contemplated their descendants' future domestication
in Kentish hop-gardens. If you run your finger and
thumb upward along the branches or young sprays,
against the grain, you will find that these prickles cut
like a rasp ; while if you look at a wild hop festooning a
hedge, in free luxuriance, in and out among the equally
prickly goose-grasses and other climbers, you will recog-
nize at once that the hooks have been developed by nat-
ural selection for the same purpose as the tendrils of the
vine and the pea, or as the little sucker-like rootlets of
the ivy. Every climbing plant must needs possess some
such means of clinging to its chosen support ; and the

HOPS BLOSSOM. 163

particular means it happens in each case to develop will
depend entirely upon the nature of its organization
before" it began to acquire the twining habit. In the vine
and the pea, tendrils readily grew out of branches or leaf-
stalks ; in the hop and the goose-grass, hooks were more
easily produced out of pre-existent hairs and asperities
still retained in their original form by other descendants
of the common ancestor.

It is the flowers of the hop, however, that give it its
chief interest in the eyes of bibulous humanity ; and the
flowering mechanism is the part of its organization in
which the plant most widely departs from the norma of
its race. On the specialization of this part, in fact, it
has expended its chief attention. In pellitory a few of
the blossoms still remain hermaphrodite, with stamens
and ovaries in the same flower ; in most of the nettles
all the blossoms are separately either male or female,
though both kinds grow together on the same plant ;
but in the hop, as in the commonest stinging-nettle, the
two kinds of flowers are altogether divided, each indi-
vidual bine bearing on its clusters only one sort or the
other. The staminiferous blossoms are of small practical
interest : they consist simply of these inconspicuous
little yellowish-green panicles, hanging from the angles
of the upper leaves in this wild creeper, and looking
very much like their near relations the nettle flowers.
Still, they keep up something like the semblance of a
floral pattern, having each five small green sepals and
five curved stamens inclosed in their midst. The female
flowers, however, which grow at last into what we know
as hops, have become so degraded or so highly developed,
whichever you choose to call it, that their true nature
is now hardly recognizable at all. Their little florets
are closely crowded together in globular heads, look-

164 COLIN- CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

ing much like a miniature green pine-cone ; and under
each bract of the cone two minute flowers are packed
away carefully in a corner, with their calyx reduced to a
tiny protective scale, and the rest of their architecture
simplified down to a single ovary inclosing one spirally
coiled seed. It is the central floral idea reduced to its
simplest possible factors. From the scales the sensitive
surface protrudes to catch the pollen blown to it in the
wild state from the male on its feathery arms ; and then
the fertilized cone begins to swell, and the bracts grow
out into large inflated cups, quite concealing the small
seed-like fruit. Whether their bitterness has been ac-
quired as a deterrent to animal enemies it would be hard
to say ; certainly, it has not availed to protect them
against man, who from time immemorial has employed
the hops to flavor the insipid drink which he prepares
from malted grain, u in quandam vini similitudinem cor-
ruptum," as Tacitus ptrts it, with naive southern con-
temptuousness for the barbaric stimulant. Certainly,
no other plant has been so little transformed under the
hands of man ; for, except so far as the mode of its cul-
tivation goes, it is still essentially the same species in the
Kentish hop-gardens as it is when it climbs at its own
free will over the hedges and thickets of South-western
England.

XXIX.

THE DEPARTURE OF THE SWIFTS.

THE earliest among all our summer migrants to leave
us for warmer autumn quarters are those large, dark,
rapid swallows, known best to country people as black
martins or jack-screamers, but to which ornithologists
have given the very appropriate name of swifts. They
coine in spring a week or ten days later than their con-
geners— about the 25th of April in an average year — and
they are all gone again by the first week in August, only
a very rare straggler being ever seen in England after the
middle of the month. Even in Southern Europe they
do not linger into September. No other bird — except
their ally, the humming-bird — is so ceaselessly active on
its wings as the swift. Popular science (or what once
passed for such) has told the same story about it as about
the bird of paradise : that it had no feet, and so was
compelled to keep forever on the wing — except when
in its nest ; and the fable has even been enshrined by
more rigid biologists in its systematic name of Cypselus
opus. On early summer evenings you may see the
swifts skimming the surface of still pools on their broad
wings, catching the May -flies and dragon-flies that hover
above the edge, and sometimes just dipping below the
level in their curved sweep to take a flying sip from the
water as they go. Their monotonous shrill scream never
ceases for a moment meanwhile ; for the swift appears
to be all nerve and muscle — a sort of miniature engine
for perpetual motion, self-feeding and self-governing,

166 COLIH CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

but using up all its powers from minute to minute, till at
last it runs down incontinently from sheer wearing out
of the unwearied vital mechanism.

I often fancy that time to the swift must seem far
fuller, and therefore far longer, than it seems to us. An
hour must be so crammed with fresh impressions and
ever-varying emotions in those quickly pulsating little
brains, that it must lengthen out subjectively to the ap-
parent dimensions of a human month. Shelley once
finely said, in one of those luminous philosophic moments
which make him at times more than a mere poet in the
purely artistic sense, that if an infinity of thought could
be crowded into a minute, that minute would be eternity.
Now, if one reflects that the swifts which are among
broad English oaks to-day will be among the laden vine-
yards of Andalusia to-morrow, and among the palm-
groves and mosques of Algeria the next day — not cooped
up by the road in narrow covered boxes, but winging
their way freely with their own wide pinions, and look-
ing down with unobstructed gaze upon all the interven-
ing seas and mountains as they pass — one can understand
that perhaps to them that wild sense of exuberance and
richness in feeling which balloonists always tell us they
experience in the upper air may be the regular and habit-
ual experience of these little birds' aerial life.

And not only must each moment be always full for
them of constantly shifting impressions ; but their ner-
vous organism itself must be attuned for a more hurried
flow of consciousness than is possible with our sluggish
human brain and muscles. The rapid movements of
wing and breast in the swift imply and necessitate a
rapid action of the heart, a rapid circulation of the blood,
a rapid inhalation and exhalation in the lungs. In a
given time the swift moves more, breathes more, and

THE DEPARTURE OF THE SWIFTS. 167

therefore probably feels and lives more, than any other
known animal. Of course the quality of its thinking
need not be at all high, judged by a human standard ;
but the quality of its vitality, the extent to which it lives
its life, must apparently be very high indeed. For a
quick flow of warm blood through the brain means on
the subjective side a vast total wave of consciousness,
sensory or emotional ; and it also probably means a very
rapid succession of ideas, however simple, a relatively
quicker perception of external objects, and a relatively
faster adjustment of muscular movement to the move-
ments of surrounding things. Anyone who watches the
swifts wheeling and curvetting over the water, or dart-
ing with unerring swoop at flies which -seem themselves
to dart faster than a human eye can follow, need hardly
doubt that to their simple little minds a second is an ap-
preciable interval of time, during which there is room
enough to form an idea, to make a muscular co-ordina-
tion, and to carry the desired movement out in fact.

Nor need we even suppose that the action of the swift
is like the action of a cricketer catching a ball off the
bat, where the muscular adjustments are made with an
unconscious celerity and accuracy which sometimes ap-
pear surprising even to the actor himself ; for the crick-
eter is performing an exceptional and remarkable act, a
tour deforce of co-ordination in its own way ; whereas
the swift is only doing what all its race habitually do and
have done for countless generations. It is impossible
not to admit that there are real differences in the appar-
ent value of time to different nervous organizations.
The wing of a gnat beats many thousand separate beats
in a minute ; and each beat, though doubtless purely
automatic, still implies for its motor-power a distinct
nervous impulse. The swift is far less rapid in its

168 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

movements than that ; but then each movement of the
swift is almost certainly conscious and voluntary. We
can hardly doubt that if clock-hands and fly-wheels
were both alive, a minute would seem a much longer
division of time to the fly-wheel than to the clock-hand.
It has been well said that in acute mania the nervous
organism is burning itself out too fast ; what is morbid
in the lunatic is normal and healthy in such a bird as the
swift.

Swifts eat on the wing, drink on the wing, and collect
materials for their nest on the wing. Hence, like all
otjier very active creatures, they produce extremely small
broods ; for the material used up in muscular motion
cannot also be devoted to genesis as well. The nests
are usually rude unshapely structures, under the eaves
of churches or among the ruins of old buildings gener-
ally ; and only two eggs are usually laid by each mother
in a single season. It would be a curious question what
these haunters of old buildings did for a home before the
days of civilized man ; for 1 have never known them
build away from human habitations or churches. Per-
haps the species in its present form may really date later
than civilization, as one may suspect of many other creat-
ures, both weeds and house parasites, like geckos and
crickets ; for after all, even civilization is old enough to
have exercised some minor transforming influence upon
the outer shapes of organic beings, as it undoubtedly
has upon their habits and instincts.

Long ago, Gilbert White was much puzzled with the
difficulty, suggested to him by the swifts, as to what
became of the annual increase which must take place
even among such small breeders as these ; for though
they lay but two eggs at a time, and sit but once each
Bumnier, instead of twice like the other swallows, yet

THE DEPARTURE OF THE SWIFTS. 169

that must give a constant increment of population at the
rate of about double every year, even after allowing for
normal deaths of old birds. What becomes of such in-
crease ? That was the question that puzzled the natural-
ist of Selborne ; and if he had been a Darwin, or even
a Malthus, it might have led him gradually on to the
great discovery of the principle of natural selection
which has since revolutionized all biological science.
As it was, he came only to the lame and impotent con-
clusion that they must disperse themselves over the re-
mainder of the world ; as though Selborne church-tower
were the central Ararat of an unpeopled and vacant con-
tinent, whence endless colonies might go forth to in-
crease and multiply and replenish the earth. In sober
fact, one half of them fail to pick up a living at all ; the
other half just keep up the standard of the race to its
fixed numerical average ; for everybody who has watch-
ed the swifts closely knows that each year just the same
number of pairs return punctually to just the same ac-
customed stations in just the same ancestral towers. In-
deed, that is the rule with the vast majority of species,
animal or vegetable. There are a few which, like man,
the Colorado beetle, and the Canadian pond- weed, are
rapidly increasing and overrunning the world ; there are
a few other which, like the great auk, the beaver, and
the edelweiss, are rapidly dying out before their enemies.
But by far the greater number seem to continue abso-
lutely invariable from year to year, at least within the
range of ordinary human observation. Out of 40,000
seeds of one common English weed, only a single seed on
an average produces a full-grown plant every season.

XXX.

WATERSIDE WEEDS.

AT the extreme lower end of the farm, where the
three-cornered croft adjoins Smallcombe Barton, our little
brooklet Yenlake broadens out for fifty yards or so into
a shallow cattle-pond, covered on its surface with bright
green fronds of floating duckweed, and bordered at the
edge by a lush margin of rank sedges and tall black-
crested reed-mace. The vegetation of this valley pool is
quite different in type from the sundews and butterworts
of the upland bogs, and yet it is almost equally wild and
beautiful in character after its own special fashion.
Comparisons, indeed, are never more odious than in the
matter of natural scenery. The other day, when I was
wandering among the tufted cotton-grasses and pretty
orange bog-asphodels of the marshy patch on the com-
mon, I said in my haste that there was nothing in Eng-
land so native and graceful in its beauty as that exquisite
flora of the peaty upland ; to-day as I stand by this little
pool of Yenlake — a mere water-logged corner trodden
down apparently by the heifers coming constantly to
drink where the bank stands lowest — I feel as though I
must go back upon my own words, and give the first
place for gracefulness among English plants to the water-
side flags and upright cat's-tails. See, here by the little
rapids where the beck tumbles by miniature cascades
into the pond, the aromatic sweet-gale grows in un-
wonted profusion ; smallest of our native catkin -bearing
trees (except the dwarf creeping willows), it loves the

WATERSIDE WEEDS. 171

neighborhood of running water, where its little thickset
bushes rise to a height of two or three feet only, and its
clusters of tiny nuts, dotted with little balls of resin
like beads of amber, overhang the petty brink with their
fragrant bunches. Crush the shiny foliage between
your fingers, and it yields at once a grateful country per-
fume, redolent of the wholesome resin in its dotted
leaves. Here, too, are tall bur-reeds, with their globu-
lar heads of greenish flowers ; and here are great grace-
ful white-blossomed arrowheads ; and here are the loll-
ing heart-shaped leaves of the floating pond-weed ; and
here again are the tall black reeds, looking like natural
maces, with their thick black heads and their waving
summit of ragged fluffy cotton, standing sentinel in long
rows over the shorter vegetation in their shadow beneath.
The truth is, our ordinary taste in the matter of flow-
ers, and especially of wild flowers, is still a trifle bar-
baric. The first thing that strikes children or savages in
flowers is their brightly-colored petals ; they care little
for beauty of shape in blossoms, for gracefulness and del-
icacy of outline in foliage, for the glossy leaves of the
holly or the hartstongue, for the infinite variety that
custom cannot stale in the crisped and wrinkled fronds
of ferns. When they pick a nosegay, it is all bright
blossoms without a touch of relieving verdure ; the
only thing they care for is the crude staring red and blue
of the largest petals. Accordingly, all the earliest
flowers to be selected for cultivation were the biggest
and brightest in hue: — the roses, peonies, sunflowers,
and hollyhocks. It is only very lately that we have
begun also to choose some plants for their foliage or their
general effect ; to grow purple-leaved coleuses, quaintly
lop-sided begonias, and crimson -hearted caladiums in our
greenhouses ; to pleach out pampas-grass, and weeping

172 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

willows, and feathery deodars with artful carelessness on
our lawns and shrubberies ; to cover the naked crannies of
our poor imitation rock-work with the dainty tracery of
ferns and club-mosses. Even now, we have not paid
sufficient attention to the ornamental value of the com-
mon wind-fertilized plants. They have no gay petals to
attract us, like their insect-haunted allies ; they do not
strike the eye at once in the dappled meadows, like the
buttercups, the fritillaries, the clematis, and the wild
daffodils ; yet they have a wonderful indescribable grace
and beauty of their own, which nobody can fail to ap-
preciate, at least when once attention has been conscious-
ly directed to their more modest and retiring shapes.
Their flowers usually either hang out loosely in long
waving panicles, like the grasses and sedges, or else clus-
ter closely together in curious globular or cylindrical
heads, like the reeds and the catkins. It is to this class
that most of the waterside weeds in England belong ;
and they share with all other wind-fertilized plants not
only the common gracefulness of habit, but also the
common marks of degradation or degeneracy from
higher and more conspicuous petal-bearing ancestors.

Look first at the floating pond- weed here, with its del-
icato leaves just basking on the surface of the pool, the
older ones of a rich glossy green as they spread along the
water's top, the younger ones not yet unrolled and of a
pale chocolate brown or fawn-color in the half-opened
bud. From the centre, a spike of little greenish flow-
ers projects above the level of the water, as plain and
unnoteworthy an inflorescence, I must admit, as anybody
could wish to see. Yet even here the plant as a whole
is made beautiful by its heart-shaped floating foliage, by
the long thin transparent sheaths that guard its stem, and
by the singularly lovely color of its unopened leaves.

WATERSIDE WEEDS. 173

And if yon look closely at the separate flowers them-
selves, you will see that they each bear obvious marks of
their ultimate derivation from bright petal-bearing pro-
genitors in their possession of four little green scales
surrounding their stamens, the last stunted relic of their
original colored corolla. This is a case where degrada-
tion has only gone, comparatively speaking, a very little
way. We can still see on the face of the flower the
rudiments of its former petals, though all their function
is now lost.

Turn next to the bur-reed here, this much-branched
bushy-looking succulent plant whose long lance-like
leaves closely overhang the shallow edge of the pool.
Its flowers look at first sight like mere round knobs or
balls, stuck quaintly on to the side of the thick juicy
branches, and decreasing in size toward the ends of the
green twigs, from the diameter of a whiteheart cherry
to that of a small pea. But when you come to look
more closely into them, you can see that they are of two
kinds, the larger and lower ones consisting of little
pointed nuts, all crowded together in a dense globe ; the
smaller and upper ones composed of clustered stamens,
irregularly interspersed with a few casual green scales.
Nothing can well be prettier than the various stages of
the female or nut-bearing heads, from the time when
they first appear as close bundles of pearly knobs till the
time when they finally assume the ripe shape of prickly
defensive capsules. Each tiny flower in these heads still
retains a slight rudiment of its lost petals in the shape of
three or six little scales surrounding its ovary ; but in
the male flowers, the scales disappear almost entirely, or
survive only as irregular or obsolescent organs scattered
lip and down among the stamens of the densely packed
head. The more thickly the blossoms are clustered, the

174 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

more are the now useless relics of the petals crowded out
between their really serviceable organs.

And now if we turn to the cat's-tails or reed-maces
that grow hard by out of the water itself, we can see the
same process carried to the furthest possible extreme of
degradation. I suppose everybody knows them by some
name or other, as black-cap rushes or something of the
sort — those great smooth round stems, four or live feet
high, surmounted by a thick woolly- looking black cylin-
der by way of a head. In reality, this cylinder is an
immense mass of such wind-fertilized flowers, crowded
together literally by myriads along a dense spike on the
stem. The top part, which grows fluffy and withers
after a short time, consists of the male blossoms, here
reduced to naked stamens only, with a few inconspicu-
ous hairs scattered among them to represent the scales
that once were petals. The lower part, which becomes
thicker and longer as the autumn wears away, consists of
the female flowers, reduced to very minute ovaries, each
surrounded by a bundle of small hairs, which similarly
stand for the three or six green scales of the female bur-
reed. Each ovary is now so extremely small that you
cannot distinguish them separately at all with the naked
eye ; if you cut the spike across, the only thing you can
see is a thick mass of soft brownish hairs, black at the
tips and paler inside toward the central stalk.

How many hundreds of thousands of flowers are thus
cribbed and cabined on a single stem nobody has ever
had the patience to count ; a mere pinch pulled out
between the finger and thumb displays under the micro-
scope an apparently infinite number of distinct florets,
each with a single tiny ovary and a fluffy envelope of
small hairs. Yet all this degradation, as we rightly ac-
count it, is strictly in adaptation to the peculiar habits of

WATERSIDE WEEDS. 175

the reed-mace. It grows by the edge of shallow waters
only ; and since these are very liable to dry up or shift
their place from time to time, it requires great numbers
of easily dispersed seeds, so as to take advantage of every
new habitat which petty topographical changes may
put at its disposal. Hence wind fertilization and winged
fruits exactly suit its special needs ; and in adaptation
to those needs it has become, perhaps, the most degraded
type of flowering plant now in existence, save only the
little floating stalkless duck-weed which forms a green
film on the surface of the half -stagnant water at its base.

XXXI.

ASPARAGUS BERRIES.

MOST English lilies flower in spring or very early sum-
mer ; but asparagus is an exception to the general rule,
for it does not come into full blossom before the middle
of July, and 1 see the big green berries are now only
just beginning to redden on the sunny side under two
weeks of the cloudless skies of August. The world at
large hardly knows asparagus at all, except as a succulent
spring vegetable ; and that one-sided point of view
doubtless makes it rather difficult for most people to rec-
ognize in it any traces whatever of the lily family.
Yet a genuine lily it really is for all that ; and if you
look attentively at these graceful feathery sprays of clus-
tered foliage (they make capital decorations in a speci-
men vase with summer blossoms), or at these little
drooping yellowish-green bell-flowers that hang pensile
here and there along the branches, you will see that the
lily type is present in all essentials, and that only the
prepossessions of the epicure element could ever have
prevented one from recognizing its true affinities at the
first glance. The blossoms, in fact, hang down not un-
like Solomon's seal, only that they are composed of sepa-
rate greenish petals, instead of having a single tubular
corolla ; and they are pretty enough in their own unob-
trusive way, though not nearly so striking as the beauti-
ful bright red berries which succeed them a little later
on in autumn. Asparagus is a wild plant of the British
south coast by origin ; and though it is now becoming

ASPARAGUS BE1UUES. 177

rather rare on our own shores, I have still picked a few
sprigs of late years on the rocky islets at Ky nance Cove in
Cornwall, and at some other isolated places along the
English seaboard from Devonshire to Wales. Its life-
history is a curious arid an interesting one, for it forms a
rare example in our own country of a green leafless
plant, with branches closely simulating foliage both in
appearance and function.

The primitive wild asparagus is a wiry herb with a
matted perennial rootstock, in which it stores up food-
stuffs during each summer for the supply of its succulent
green shoots in the succeeding spring. Under tillage
we have made it increase from its primitive stature of
two feet or less to an average height of four or five ; and
at the same time its spring shoots, which are slender and
rather stringy in its native sands, have grown much
stouter and softer under stress of continuous selection
directed to this single end alone. But in order to make

O

it send up vigorous grass (as gardeners call it) at the re-
turn of spring, we are obliged to let it grow tall and
bushy during the whole summer, so as to elaborate
plenty of rich materials, including its essential flavoring
principle asparagine, in the creeping rootstock from
which next year's sprouts will draw their whole supply
of food. That is why, though we finished cutting in
June, the bushes must still go on cumbering the earth
till they die down naturally on the approach of autumn.
If we hacked it down at present we should have no aspar-
agus to speak of next season.

Now, everybody has noticed that the young shoots
which form the eatable part of asparagus are covered by
small pointed purplish scales ; and these scales are, in
fact, almost the only true leaves that the plant ever puts
forth in its present condition. But as it grows older it

178 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

begins to branch off into numerous sprays to right and
left ; and these sprays are covered with clusters of f eatli-
ery green spikes, closely resembling foliage, and not at
all unlike the needles of firs and some other conifers.
In reality, however, these apparent leaves are abortive
flower-stalks ; while the only true leaves on the branches
are some very small and almost microscopical scales
around the point where the needles diverge from the stem
that bears them. It is true the little wiry branches do
all the work that real leaves ought to do ; they are quite
green, and they act as digesters of carbon from the air
for the plant ; so that it seems at first sight a hard say-
ing to be told that they are at bottom only flower-stalks.
Yet so certain is that curious fact, that even long before
evolution was dreamt of, all technical botanists had fully
made up their minds that the apparent leaves of aspara-
gus and its allies must be theoretically described as
" abortive pedicels." And this is probably the way that
such a strange freak of nature first came about.

Asparagus is a simple species of lily which lias taken
(in its wild state) to growing in very dry and sandy soils.
Now, the lily type of leaf, as we all know, is a long thin
succulent blade, extremely ill-adapted for dry or sandy
places. Hence all the lilies which are driven by circum-
stances to take up their abode in such spots have been
forced to get rid of their own real leaves, and to develop
some other distinct organ into a serviceable foliar substi-
tute in their place. If they did not do so, they died out
entirely, and there was an end of them ; only those
which happened to accommodate themselves to their en-
vironment in this particular succeeded in finally surviv-
ing ; and among such survivors are the asparagus bushes
of the present day.

How such changes began to take place we can better

ASPARAGUS BERRIES. 179

understand if we look for a moment at the analogous
case of the butcher's broom which grows instead of box
in the little hedge here by the shrubbery. Butcher's
broom is another aberrant lily, and a very close ally of
the asparagus tribe ; but it shows us the same peculiari-
ties in a rather less marked and advanced degree. I
suppose everybody knows its stiff prickly leaves, with a
small white six-petalled flower apparently growing out
of the very centre of each leaf. In this case it is easier
to realize that the seeming leaves are really altered
branches— first because we can actually see the flowers
still budding out of their midst ; and, secondly, because
if we look close we can observe a minute scale, which is
the rudiment of a true leaf, springing from their midrib
just below the point where the flowers are given off.
Careful examination, in fact, shows us that the branch
has become flattened and leaf -like, but that it still retains
all the essential characters of a branch ; because it bears
flowers and true leaves, whereas, of course, nobody ever
saw one true leaf growing right out of the back of
another. It is worthy of notice, too, that, in order to
protect the flowers from injury, each seeming leaf twists
at the stalk, and so turns its upper surface downward to
the ground. In time the female flowers grow into brill-
iant scarlet berries, which look as if they were gummed
on to the lower side of the leaves ; and these berries con-
tain a couple of little hard-shelled nutlets, which are dis-
persed by the assistance of birds, as in most other similar
cases.

Now, in butcher's broom, almost all these leaf-like
branches still bear flowers and berries on the mid-rib of
their expanded surface ; but there are a good many
barren branches on each bush, which act as leaves pure
and simple ; while a few scales beneath each such branch

180 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

represent the original flat blades of the primitive lily
ancestor. In asparagus, the same process has been car-
ried just one step further. The young spring shoots
here bear flat mauve scales, not iinlike in shape to an
abortive grass-blade ; but on- the upper branches these
scales become very small and inconspicuous indeed, while
from their angles there project a number of long needle-
like green points, which form the practical working
foliage of the plant at the present day. Every here and
there, three or four of them bear a little drooping green-
ish lily-flower each at their summit, especially near the
lower end of each branchlet ; but by far the greater
number spring in little clusters of four or five together
from the axil of a scaly leaf, without any flowers at all at
their pointed ends. They are, in fact, abortive flower-
stalks, like the barren branches on the butcher's broom ;
only in this case the vast majority of flower-stalks are
thus abortive, and only a very small number devote
themselves to their proper function of producing blos-
soms.

It must not be imagined, however, that the asparagus
once passed through the butcher's broom stage ; the re-
semblance between the two plants is rather analogical
than strictly genetic. Both, doubtless, are ultimately de-
scended from simple typical lily ancestors, which had suf-
fered dwarfing of the true leaves through their enforced
restriction to dry habitats ; and with both only those
individuals have finally survived which happened to
diverge in directions adapted to their new mode of life.
The butcher's broom has made its way by developing
stiff, prickly, and expanded branches, whose broad
green wings do duty instead of leaves ; the asparagus
has attained the same end by producing vast numbers of
small thread-like flower-stalks, only a small proportion

ASPARAGUS BERRIES. 181

of which ever actually bear perfect flowers. But so far
as its blossom is concerned, the asparagus stands nearer
to the prime ancestor than does the butcher's broom ; for
it still possesses three distinct calyx-pieces and three
petals ; whereas in its ally all six parts have long since
grown quite indistinguishable ; and in the minor details
of the stamens and pistil the asparagus also retains more
markedly than its ally the common ancestral traits.
Hence we cannot say that one form has been actually
derived from the other ; both are rather divergent de-
scendants of a single central ancestor, whose Deculiarities
each has modified in a different direction.

XXXIII.

THE KERNING OF THE WHEAT.

A NARROW single- file pathway leads obliquely as a
short cut across the lower corn-field to the bridge, and
on either hand the mellowing corn rises sharply beside
it like a wall, with its tall shocks now just turning from
pale green to golden brown before the ripening sun and
the warping wind. As I pass through it I cannot avoid
trampling down a haulm or two of the overhanging straw
here and there, so closely does the crop encroach upon the
track that threads among it. There are bright yellow
corn-marigolds scattered in between the heads, and great
scarlet poppies by the edge, and dark bluebottles further
afield, and lilac scabiouses overtopping even the tallest
beards. Beneath, too, there is an interloping mat of
smaller weeds : lithe climbing buckwheat or black
bindweed, with its barbed and heart-shaped leaves ex-
actly mimicking the lesser convolvulus, whose funnel-
like blossoms open by its side ; stiff wiry knot-grass
forming here and there a ragged undersward ; creeping
toadflax pressing tight to the ground its broad leaves
and snap-dragon flowers ; red bartsia sucking out the
life-blood of the corn with its parasitic rootlets and cling-
ing suckers. For even the most carefully tended
wheat-fields are always more or less thickly choked with
those innumerable weeds of cultivation which no tillage
can ever eradicate ; hardy Asiatic straylings whose seeds
have followed the grains and pulses over Europe and
America, and whose constitution successfully defies every

THE KERNING OF THE WHEAT. 183

attempt to kill them down by fair means or foul. The
more you uproot them or burn them or sift their seeds,
the more pertinacious are those which still survive ; for
by picking out the more conspicuous you only leave the
more insidious to spread arid multiply ; and by cutting
off the roots from the sicklier you only leave the stronger
to send up fresh suckers and runners from their wounded
stocks. Yet, in spite of hard competition, and all this
wealth of intermingled weed, the corn now looks far
better than one could reasonably have hoped a week or
two ago ; and the shocks have filled out bravely for the
most part under the late fine weather ; though there are
really many empty spikelets, I fear, on most of the heads
— mere barren chaff, with no grain inside it. Even in
the field we have already cut there will be no certainty
as to the actual yield until we begin the regular autumn
threshing.

The sample spikes that I have picked from beside the
path and roughly husked by rolling them between my
palms seem to promise a fairly large harvest in this
particular patch of corn-land. The grains are large and
full, and the number of fertile spikelets on each head is
pretty well up to the average. Few things are sweeter
than fresh wheat, chewed till it is reduced to the condi-
tion of gluten ; and 1 suppose it must have been some
such chance trial on the part of some early savage that
first suggested the notion of cultivating the wild goat-
grass which became the ancestor of all our modern" wheat.
A hungry hunter, no doubt, coining home unsuccessfully
from stalking the antelopes with his flint-tipped arrows,
rubbed between his dusky hands some of the grasses that
grew on the open plain around him, and extracted from
their chaffy scales a few insignificant but sweet little
seeds. The original parents of all our cereals were

184

grasses of one kind or other, often belonging to remotely
different groups, but almost all indigenous inhabitants of
the Central Asian and Mediterranean regions. The mil-
lets of India have been developed from wild species
closely resembling certain rare English grasses found
only in the southern counties ; the wild barleys grow
abundantly in many parts of Britain ; and the wild oat,
which flourishes in every district of England, is certainly
the ancestor of our cultivated oats. But the pedigree
of wheat, the most important of all our cereals, is a little
more obscure ; it has varied to a greater degree from its
humble original than any other known artificial plant.
Fortunately, we are still able to recover the steps by
which it has been developed from what might at first
sight appear to be a very unlikely and ill-endowed ances-
tor indeed.

The English couch-grass, which often proves such a
troublesome weed in our own country, is represented
around the Mediterranean shores by an allied genus of
annual plants known as goat-grass ; and one of these
weedy goat-grasses has now been shown with great prob-
ability to be the wild form of our cultivated wheat.
It is a small dwarfish grass, with very petty seeds, and
not nearly so full a spike as the cereals of agriculture ;
but it was long ago remarked as closely allied to true
wheat, in all essential structural points ; and by constant
tillage and selection it has again been made of late years
to develop rapidly into a form not unlike that of the
poorest and earliest* cultivated wheats. Of course, it
cannot be expected that experiments, however skilful,
spread over a few years only, would succeed in produc-
ing from the wild stock grains equal to those which have
been produced by countless generations of unconscious or
semi-conscious selection on the part of primeval tillers.

THE KERKING OF THE WHEAT. 185

Still, enough has been done to show that even a short
course of carefully directed tillage will transform the
Mediterranean goat-grass into a fair imitation of the
wheat grown by our earliest agricultural ancestors.

How soon in the history of man the goat-grass began
to be deliberately sown in little plots of ground around
the huts of evolving savages we can now hardly guess ;
certainly there remain no existing traces of its use by the
very first race which inhabited Europe — the palaeolithic
hunters who chased the mammoth and the woolly rhinoc-
eros among the jungles of Abbeville or by the glacier-
bound terraces of the Thames Valley. But when man
first reappears in northern Europe, after the great ice-
sheets once more cleared away from the face of the land,
we find him growing and using a rude form of wheat
from the earliest moment of his re-establishment in the
desolated plains. Among the pile-villages of the Swiss
lakes, which were inhabited by men of the newer stone
age, we find side by side with the polished flint axes and
the hand-made pottery of the period several cereals raised
by the lake-dwellers on the neighboring mainland.
The charred seeds and water-logged shocks disinterred
from the ruins of the villages include millet, barley, and
several other grains ; but by far the commonest among
them is a peculiar small form of wheat, which has been
named scientifically after the ancient folk by whom it was
used.

This lake-wheat, however, though it dates back to the
very beginning of the recent period in Europe, cannot
be considered as the first variety developed from the
primitive goat-grass by the earliest cultivators ; it is so
superior in character to the wild stock that it must
already have undergone a long course of tillage and selec-
tion in more genial climates, and must have been

186 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

brought back to Europe in a comparatively perfect con-
dition by the short dark people who settled our continent
immediately after the termination of the glacial era.
While the ice-sheet still spread over the face of England,
as it now spreads over the face of Greenland, the ances-
tors of the neolithic people must have been slowly im-
proving the breed of wheat somewhere among the re-
cesses of the central Asian plateau ; arid by the time the
northern peninsulas and islands became once more habit-
able, they must have returned to the vacant lands, bring-
ing with them the seeds of their goat-grass, now ad-
vanced to the condition of the small lake- wheat. This
gulf has again been nearly bridged over for us by the
direct experiments conducted of late years in France and
at Cirencester.

From the neolithic time forward, the improved seed
has continued to grow bigger and bigger, both in the size
of the shocks and in the girth of the individual grains,
until the present day. The original small lake-wheat,
indeed, lingered on in use in Switzerland and the north
down to the days of the Roman conquest ; but mean-
while, in Egypt and the south, still better varieties were
being gradually developed by careful selection ; and we
find both kinds side by side in some few instances ; thus
showing that both were grown together at the same time
by races in different stages of civilization. "With the in-
troduction of these better kinds by the Greek and Roman
colonists into Gaul and Britain, the old lake-wheat be-
came quite extinct. Indeed, in every case the cultivated
seeds and fruits which grew in neolithic garden plots
were much smaller than those of our own time ; whereas
the wild seeds and wild fruits found under the same cir<-
cumstances are just as large as their congeners of the
present day. In other words, while circumstances have

THE KERNING OF THE WHEAT. 187

not since compelled any increase of size in the wild
plants, constant selection lias produced a great increase
in the cultivated varieties. It must not, however, be
inferred that no changes whatever have since come over
the wild kinds in any respect ; as in all other cases,
there has been change and modification in minor matters
proportionate to the lapse of time which has since inter-
vened. But a lapse which makes relatively little differ-
ence to the stable wild weeds makes relatively great
differences in the very plastic and carefully selected cul-
tivated plants.

XXXIII.

THE ORIGIN OF GROUSE.

A HAMPER of grouse from a friend in Scotland lias a
double interest, biological and culinary. I shall hand
over the four even brace to the cook for further opera-
tions ; and I shall dissect the odd bird as an ornithologi-
cal study. The common red grouse of the Scotch moors
indeed may be considered in one particular as the most
interesting living group of British birds. They form at
present the only species of higher vertebrates entirely
peculiar to these islands. We have, it is true, several
local species of British trout, found only in certain small
pools or mountain tarns of Wales, Scotland, or Ireland ;
but beside the red grouse we have no indigenous bird,
mammal, reptile, or amphibian wholly peculiar to our
own country. This fact gives a very singular interest to
the grouse, and naturally suggests the question, whence
did it come to us ?

As a whole, there can be no doubt that the mass of
our existing British fauna and flora is North European,
and that it reached our shores in the interval between the
last glacial period and the final insulation of Great Brit-
ain and Ireland. It is now universally acknowledged by
biologists and geologists that after the great ice-sheet
finally cleared off the face of England, our islands
formed for some considerable time an outlying penin-
sula of the European continent, like Spain or Scandina-
via at the present day ; and over the broad bridge of
land which then occupied the bed of the German Ocean

THE ORIGIN OF GftOUSE. . 189

and the Irish Sea, the plants and animals of temperato
Europe spread by slow degrees across the unoccupied
plains and valleys of the British Isles. Their onward
course* over the land denuded by the ice-sheet was un-
doubtedly very tardy, for many species never succeeded
in reaching England at all ; while others, which got as
far as our own island, did not travel as much to the west
as Ireland before the submergence of St. George's
Channel made that part of Britain into a separate island.
It is, perhaps, to this accident of position, rather than to
the exterminating efforts of St. Patrick, that Ireland
owes its famous freedom from the presence of many
terrestrial reptiles and amphibians. A little later, before
the advanced guard of the European mammalia had fully
occupied our eastern coasts, the North Sea and the
Straits of Dover were invaded by arms of the Atlantic,
and Great Britain finally assumed its insular shape.
Thus our existing fauna and flora really represent a
mere fraction of the Central European species — the few
pioneer kinds that had travelled so far on their way into
the bare waste before the sea cut us off from the remain-
der of the European world. We are comparatively rich
in insects, birds, bats, and plants, whose wings, eggs, or
seeds give them special opportunities of transport across
the sea ; but we are very poor indeed in terrestrial mam-
mals and land-amphibians, which cannot readily be
transported across wide stretches of intervening water.

Mr. Wallace has noticed that in all such insulated
lands there is a great tendency for species to vary, partly
through the special sets of circumstances to which they
are thus exposed, and partly through the rarity of crosses
with the original stock, which doubtless continues to de-
velop and alter on its own part in another direction,
under pressure of other influences to which it is exposed

190 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

in the wider continents where it dwells. Iii Britain,
though so recently separated from the mainland, as Mr.
Wallace points out, this tendency has already produced a
fe\v very marked effects- An immense number ,of our
hative plantis appear in slightly different varieties from
tniofce of the mainland ; and in our outlying islands, such
as Mali} Wight > Lundy, Arran, and the Hebrides, such
Variation is exceptionally common. Among insects we
have several British species ; among fish we have six or
seven kinds of trout ; and among birds we have the
grouse, which is quite unknown in any other part of the
world. Its nearest Continental representative is the
willow-grouse of Scandinavia, which ranges all round the
northern hemisphere even up to the Pole. But the willow-
grouse changes its coat to white in winter, like the ptar-
migan, whereas the Scotch red grouse keeps its summer
dress the whole year round :• and many minor points of
difference have caused our own bird to be universally
ranked by naturalists as a good species. Ought we really
to regard it as the primitive type from which the Conti-
nental bird is derived, or ought we rather to consider it
as a special insular descendant of the willow-grouse, or
ought we finally to look upon both as divergent lateral
branches from a single original common stock ? Prob-
ably the last, and for these reasons.

The bird which came northward at the close of the
glacial period, to inhabit the now thawed plains of north-
ern Europe, much as the American partridge might take
possession of Greenland if all its glaciers were to clear
away in a more genial era, was doubtless a more or less
southern and temperate type of grouse-kind. Coming
into Britain, it would soon be entirely isolated from all
its allies elsewhere ; for it is of course a poor flyer for
distance, and it inhabits only the northerly or westerly

THE ORIGIN OF GROUSE. * 191

parts of our island which lie furthest from the Conti-
nent, separated from Holland and Scandinavia by a
wide sea. Here it could not fail to be subjected to
special conditions, differing greatly from those of the
European mainland, partly in the equable insular cli-
mate, partly in the nature of the vegetation, and partly
in the absence of many mammalian foes or competitors.
These conditions would be likely first to affect the color-
ing and marking of the feathers, the spots on the bill,
the naked scarlet patch about the eye, and so forth ; for
we know that even freer-flying birds in the south, which
cross often with Continental varieties, tend slightly to
vary in such ornamental points ; and a very isolated
group like the red grouse would be far more likely to
vary in similar directions. Meanwhile, the main branch
of the family, separated on the great continents from
this slightly divergent group, would probably acquire
the habit of changing its plumage in winter among the
snows of the north, by stress of natural selection, just as
the Arctic fox and so many other northern animals have
done ; for in a uniform white surface any variation of
color is far more certain to be spotted and cut off than
in a many-colored and diversified environment. Thus it
would seem probable that the Scotch grouse has slowly
become accommodated to the heather, among which it is
so hard to discover it ; while the willow-grouse has
grown to resemble the snow in winter, and the barer
grounds of its northern feeding-places in the short Scan-
dinavian and Icelandic summer.

If this be so, we must regard both birds as slightly
divergent descendants of a- common ancestor, from
which, however, our grouse has varied less than its Con-
tinental congener. Of course, it is just possible that the
common ancestor ha'd already acquired the habit of

193 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

changing its coat in winter before the divergence took
place ; and if so, then it is the Scotch grouse which has
altered most ; but this is less probable, because the use-
fulness of the change would certainly be felt even in a
Scotch winter, and the white suit is not, therefore, likely
ever to have been lost when once acquired. Though the
winter is not severe enough in Scotland to make such a
change of coat inevitable where it does not already exist,
it is yet quite severe enough to preserve the habit in ani-
mals which have once acquired it, as we see in the case
of the varying hare, a creature which in colder ages
spread over the whole of northern Europe, and which
still holds its own among the chillier portions of the
Scotch Highlands. Hence we may reasonably infer that
if our grouse had ever possessed a winter coat it would
have always retained it for an alternative dress, as the
ptarmigan still does in the self-same latitudes. Accord-
ingly, analogy seems to point to the conclusion that the
Scotch grouse is a truly native breed, slightly altered by
the conditions of its insular habitat from a closely allied
Continental species, whose representatives elsewhere
have now all assumed the guise of Scandinavian willow-
grouse. In other words, the two isolated groups into
which the species has split up have altered each in its
own way, but the Continental variety has moved faster
away from the primitive type than its British congeners.

XXXIV.

PLUMS KIPEN.

THE blue plums in the garden have now acquired their
ripe purple bloom, and their cousins the sloes on the
blackthorn bushes in the copse are fast softening to such
sour pulpiness as their wild nature ever permits them.
In outer look the plum-tree and the sloe-bush do not
present any very close resemblaace ; yet the one is really
the cultivated offspring of the other, and their history is
consequently the same throughout — at least until we ar-
rive at its penultimate chapter, with the first domestica-
tion, so to speak, of the eastern sloes by man. Plums
and sloes are roses by family, descended from original
creeping ancestors not unlike the wild strawberry plant,
only without its peculiar juicy and succulent fruit. A
long course of unrecorded development in the progeni-
tors of the plum kind has made their stems grow con-
stantly woodier and woodier, by numerous stages which
we can still roughly trace through every gradation of
herb, shrub, bush, and tree throughout an immense col-
lection of diverse congeners. From simple little weedy
annuals, which die down entirely every winter, and are
reproduced next year by seed alone, we pass on upward
through perennials with slightly woody underground
stocks, sending forth fresh flowering steins with each re-
turning spring, to small tough under-shrubs whose
branches alone die down in autumn, and finally to arbo-
rescent bushes, all of whose stiff er boughs become perma-
nently woody from the very first. And side by side

194 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

with this upward evolution from the green weed to the
solid tree we can trace a concomitant evolution from the
many-seeded berry like the raspberry or the blackberry
to the one-seeded stone-fruit like the sloe and the plum.
All those members of the rose family which have reached
this highest type of rose development, with shrubby
or tree-like stems and one-seeded fruits, form together
the almond sub-tribe of modern botanists. As in all
other cases, their succulent fruit-coverings are due to the
selective agency of birds and forestine animals, which
aid them in dispersing their large, hard, indigestible
seeds ; and the unusual size of these coverings shows at
once that they belong as a class to sub-tropical and tropical
regions, being adapted to large and active animal allies,
as our English wild strawberries, raspberries, and black-
berries are adapted to the smaller needs of northern
birds.

Even among the plum or almond sub-tribe itself there
are many differences of size and color in the fruit, ac-
cording to the special localities where the various trees
have fixed their home. Our little black English bird-
cherry is a northern and Arctic variety ; it flourishes best
in Lapland and Scandinavia, becomes scarcer and scarcer
as we move down into Scotland and central Europe, dis-
appears altogether in southern England and Ireland, and
only penetrates into the south European and south
Asiatic regions along the snowy chains of the Cau-
casus and the Himalayas. The fruit is eaten chiefly
by the larger northern game-birds ; and it has never
been found worthy of systematic cultivation. Our
common sloe has a more southerly range and a bigger
fruit; but even it in the wild state is very sour and
little relished except by our native birds. In south-
eastern Europe and Central Asia, however, the sloes

PLUMS RIPEX. 195

grow larger and somewhat sweeter ; their bushes are
more tree-like and not so thorny as with us ; and the
whole plant approaches much nearer in appearance to
the cultivated plum. This southern variety, often dis-
tinguished as a separate species, but still linked to the
common northern blackthorn by infinitesimal gradations
of intermediate forms, is the wild stock from which the
earliest garden-plums were originally raised. Still more
southern in type is the ancestral cherry, which extends
in a doubtfully wild state as far north as Britain, though
here it appears rather to be a seedling straggler from
orchards than a truly indigenous tree. The apricot,
which belongs in all essential particulars to the plum
group, comes from still further south, being a denizen of
Armenia by origin, developed under the influence of the
great sub-tropical fruit-eaters, who feed upon it in its
native woodlands. Peaches differ from plums, and es-
pecially from the transitional apricot, only in the wrin-
Ided character of the stone — a protection apparently
against the teeth of monkeys or large rodents ; and they
belong originally to Persia, Afghanistan, and the neigh-
boring regions. Their fruit represents the highest level
of size attained by the plum or almond group, though
they fall far short in girth and brilliancy of the great
tropical kinds produced in the regions of toucans, horn-
bills, cockatoos, parrots, and other large, bright-hued
fruit-eaters. Even in southern countries, however, there
are many small species, adapted to the smaller birds,
such as the common laurel and the Portuguese laurel,
both of which are true plums, with evergreen leaves to
suit a milder winter climate.

Our own sloes must doubtless have branched off from
the common central one-seeded stone-fruit group about
the middle of the tertiary period. They are very closely

196

allied in every respect to the cherries, which represent
only a somewhat more southerly variation of the same
ancestral stock. As bushes of the northern thickets,
however, the sloe-trees have either acquired or retained
the habit of producing short abortive pointed branches
along the stems, which act as defensive thorns to prevent
the attacks of the larger animals. They blossom very
early in spring, before the leaves are out, for they have
a comparatively large fruit to perfect before autumn in
the precarious sunshine of an English summer ; and
besides, they have to anticipate the more attractive
wThite-thorn, which almost monopolizes the attentions of
the fertilizing bees in its own rather later flowering
season. The material for the blossoms is already laid by
in the permanent tissues of the bush, and therefore the
blackthorn can flower equally well at any time, as far as
resources go. But those bushes which flower earliest
must always have best succeeded in alluring bees, and
have fared best in setting their fruits, while later individ-
uals could not compete with the lush-scented and
thicker-blooming may, and could not always ripen their
seeds before the advent of the autumn frosts. Hence the
habit of early blossoming has become ingrained in the
race by the constant survival of those families which pos-
sessed it, and the constant dying-out of those families
which delayed their bloom till the may was out.

With us, the sloes are small, hard, and very acrid ;
but in southern Europe and central Asia, where the con-
ditions are more favorable for the production of large
and juicy fruits, they become longer, sweeter, pulpier,
and less bitter ; the trees grow taller, with more of a
distinct trunk ; and, as a natural consequence, they tend
rather to lose the thorns, which are only serviceable to
small straggling bushes, liable to be trodden under foot

PLUMS RIPEK. 197

by cattle, deer, or antelopes. It is this southern variety
that was first taken in hand by man as a garden fruit ;
for almost all our common cultivated plants come to us,
with the rest of our civilization, from the central Asian
and Mediterranean region. The little bullace now most
nearly resembles the wild southern stock, and it has been
discovered and recognized among the rubbish-heaps of
the Swiss Lake villages ; so that its cultivation is at least
as old as the later stone age, and probably far older, for
it appears even then as a distinctly cultivated and im-
proved variety. Still, these very ancient bullaces are
considerably smaller than the smallest garden plums of
the present day, as is always the case with fruits and
seeds found under similar circumstances.

By dint of long selection our modern plum-trees have
lost their thorns, doubtless because the thorny specimens
were disagreeable to the pickers, so that any stray thorn-
less sport would be sure to obtain a preference and be
used as the chosen parent of future varieties. To be
sure, the gooseberry-bush has not yet lost its prickles ;
but then the gooseberry is a comparatively recent fruit in
cultivation, hardly dating back much further in time
than some ten centuries, whereas the plum has been
grown by man for a practically immemorial period.
Under stress of tillage, the original bullace has been once
more distributed into the various types of damsons,
greengages, Orleans plums, and golden drops, which
differ from one another in their fruit far more than the
bullace itself differs from the wild sloe of southern
Europe. Indeed, seeing that all these markedly distinct
varieties have been demonstrably produced within quite
recent times from a single common ancestor, it is not
difficult to understand how that ancestor itself may have
been produced at a still earlier age from the central

198 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

parent stock of all the plums, apricots, and cherries.
What nature thus did before by her slow selection, man
has merely continued to do more rapidly by his quicker
and exclusive methods. Only, man concentrates his at-
tention on one single point alone — the succulent fruit ;
nature equally favors every useful variation in stem, leaf,
flower, fruit, or seed alike. Hence it happens that
while the wild cherry differs slightly from the blackthorn
in almost every particular, the greengage differs from
the damson almost exclusively in the fruit, every other
part remaining essentially identical. If cultivated plums
are allowed to sow themselves and run wild at the pres-
ent day, they retain their tree-like form, but revert
rapidly to the bullace type. If long permitted to con-
tinue wild, however, they show a tendency at last to go
back even to the parent south European blackthorn.
Their acquired habits are not yet sufficiently ingrained
in the race to constitute them a good and permanent
species.

XXXV.

THE PEAK HAEVEST.

THE orchard does not show by any means such a
pretty sight now as it promised to do in the early prime
of a splendid flowering season. Then, the apple-trees
were draped from head to foot in a mass of rich pinky
blossom, and the bees that hovered over them all day
long seemed to presage a good setting of the fruit against
the autumn picking. But something or other has gone
wrong with the development of the fruit ; the great
cyclone in early summer caught the leaf -buds in the very
act of unfolding, and nipped them so severely that the
trees now hardly show any foliage at all on their naked
straggling branches. Leaves, of course, are the mouths
by which the plant drinks in fresh material from the
surrounding air ; for it is a great mistake to suppose that
its chief nutriment is derived from the buried roots.
The soil supplies water and mineral constituents to be
sure ; but the true food of the tree, the vegetable matter
which it builds up into wood and leaf and flower and
fruit, comes to it from the floating carbon and hydrogen
in the air alone. So without a fair supply of foliage to
assimilate this aerial nourishment it is impossible for the
plant to produce large and healthy fruit ; though, on the
other hand, when it uses up all its vigor in putting forth
a rich crop of leaves, it has little material left for flowers
or apples. The pears, however, escaped with compara-
tively little damage ; they are earlier by ten or fifteen
days than the apple-trees, and they seem to have gained

200 COLD* CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

strength enough meanwhile to enable them to withstand
the gale better than their tenderer and later neighbors.
Different trees and different varieties show very different
degrees of hardihood in this matter ; some kinds of
pear, such as the Forelle, will resist frost just after
flowering which kills every other sort ; while compara-
tively few pippins or improved English varieties of apple
can be grown at all in the latitude of Stockholm. In
fact, the petty differences upon which natural selection
works for the ultimate production of new species exist
abundantly everywhere ; and there is hardly any such*
difference, however minute, that will not give one
variety an advantage over another in some peculiar
habitat or situation.

Fundamentally, of course, apples and pears may be
regarded as slightly divergent descendants of the same
common ancestor. Our sour little wild crabs and hedge-
row pears show us the two types in their earliest diver-
gent form, as yet not very widely separated from one an-
other ; for their distinctive excellences have been largely
brought out by cultivation, which, as in many other
cases, has exaggerated their differences of set purpose, so
as to produce two fruits in place of one. The rose
family, that great mother of succulent fruits, which rises
in one direction toward the plums and the peaches, rises
in another toward the pears and apples. But the mode
in which the fruity effect is here produced greatly differs
in principle from the mode in which it is produced
among the plum tribe. There the solitary seed or
stone, with its pulpy covering, stands out from the calyx
as a separate organ in the centre of the flower ; here, on
the contrary, the five cells or seed- vessels which make up
the core have completely coalesced with the swollen
calyx, so that the latter forms the edible portion of the

THE PEAR HARVEST. 201

so-called frnit. Indeed, it is difficult to examine a
pear without observing that the fleshy part really consists
of a mere expansion of the stalk, with its fibres gradu-
ally lost in a mass of sweet succulent tissue. This
change has been very curiously brought about by the
sinking of the seed-vessels into the body of the stalk, a
singular plan for insuring safer fertilization on the visits
of bees.

The same device is found throughout all the allied
members of the rose family, such as the true roses, the
hawthorn, and the medlar ; but nowhere in such per-
fection as among the narrower pear and apple group.
It has nothing in common with the method adopted by
the strawberry, where the common bed of the numerous
seed-cells assumes a succulent condition ; nor with that
adopted by the raspberry and blackberry, where the
outer coat of each seed-vessel becomes itself a juicy
covering ; nor with that adopted by the plum and
cherry, which is identical with the raspberry type, save
that the number of pulpy seed-vessels to each blossom is
reduced to one only. The immense variety of plans by
which nature thus secures the same end — the dispersion
of the seed by birds or mammals — shows us that what-
ever may be the character of the useful tendency, it will
be equally encouraged and selected by survival of the
fittest, irrespective of its conformity to or divergence
from any fanciful ideal type.

It is fairly certain that the hawthorns, medlars, and a
few other allied groups are all descended from a common
ancestor with the pears and apples, and that this ances-
tor branched off from the main line of rose development
at a very early period. All of them still retain the
primitive number of five fruit-cells, which has been
wholly lost in many allied types. But while the

202 COLIK CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

hawthorns and some of their congeners have gone on to
acquire hard, bony, nut-like coverings to their seeds, the
cell-walls of the pear and apple group remain simply
thin and cartilaginous, making what we call a core ; so
that the whole fruit can be readily cut across with a knife
— a peculiarity which at once distinguishes this minor
tribe from all its stony-celled neighbors. The so-called
wild service-tree (a complete misnomer, for the cultivat-
ed service is derived, not from this but from the moun-
tain ash) still pretty accurately represents for us the orig-
inal stock from which the higher pears and apples are
derived. It is a tall shrub or small bush, common in
central and southern Europe, but not often seen in Eng-
land, except in the southern counties, where it grows
sparingly in hangers and copses. Its small brown globu-
lar berries are apples in a very miniature form indeed.
They are still occasionally sold in country markets ; and
they form a favorite food of small birds, by whom their
pips are widely dispersed. In the shape of its leaves, as
in other points, the wild service-tree may be regarded
as a sort of central junction, whence the other members
of the pear group have slowly diverged in different
directions. For while the true roses and most other
early members of the rose family have very compound
leaves, composed (as everybody knows) of several little
toothed leaflets, arranged opposite one another on either
side of a common leaf-stalk, the wild service-tree has
broad leaves, vandyked only half-way through into a
few pointed lobes ; and this type marks it out at once as
an intermediate stage between the very much divided
foliage of the true roses and the perfectly simple ellipti-
cal foliage of the pear and the apple.

From such a central junction, then, or rather from
some ancestral form closely resembling it, the primitive

THE PEAR HARVEST. 203

pear-like bushes began once more to split up under press-
ure of special selection into two divergent branches.
One branch, clinging rather to the mountainous dis-
tricts, and accommodating itself to the peculiar circum-
stances of its own chosen habitat, developed gradually
into the rowan or mountain ash ; a moderate-sized tree
in sheltered uplands, a stunted shrub on wind-swept
summits or at very high latitudes beside the Arctic
Circle. Like most other trees of windy regions, it has
its leaves divided into small opposite leaflets, to prevent
them from being tattered by the storms ; so that here
the vandyked lobes of the wild service-tree have separated
into a number of totally distinct pieces, arranged in reg-
ular rows along a central leaf -stalk. Indeed, it is a gen-
eral principle of foliage that wherever means of growth
fail, the leaves become first indented between the main
ribs and finally separated into distinct segments ; which
produces the immense variety in the outer shape of
closely related leaves, whose ribs and veins nevertheless
remain essentially identical. At the same time, the
berries of the mountain ash have grown very numerous
and bright red in hue, so as to attract the arctic or north-
ern birds, which have a keen eye for anything like a
patch of brilliant color. If you cut them across the mid-
dle, however, you will see that they remain generically
apples in structure and architecture ; while their culti-
vated form, the service fruit of the Continent, still bears
witness to their common origin by actually assuming the
shape of a little brownish pear. From the same central
junction, on the other hand, the time pears and apples
diverged in another direction, spreading rather southward
and eastward, and attaining a tree-like stature, with
foliage and fruits better adapted to a lowland existence.
Their leaves gradually lost the deep lobes of the wild

204: COLD* CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

service-tree, and became regular ovals in shape, marked
at the edges by a number of small fine teeth only, as
befits denizens of the sheltered dells, with free
elbow-room for catching the full flood of the air and
the sunlight. At the same time, their flowers grew
fewer and their fruits larger, as almost always happens
with more southerly species of northern types. Still
later, the true pear and the true apple parted company
with one another, and with their near allies the Siberian
crab and the pyrus japonica. Their real differences are
after all very slight ; if it were not for the marked
flavor of the fruit probably no one would ever think of
reckoning them as distinct species.

XXXYI.

SOME ALPINE CLIMBERS.

ON the very summit of the moor here, among the
mossy clefts of the weathered granite, a few straggling
tufts of northern rock-cress still manage to keep good
their footing on an area not wider in every direction
than the circle described by a radius of some four or five
hundred yards from the central boulder on which I am
sitting. Small as is the patch of ground over which
they thus extend, they can doubtless boast a very con-
siderable prehistoric antiquity ; for there is every reason
to believe that they and their ancestors have struggled
on here in lonely isolation ever since the end of the
great glacial era. Nothing adds so much to the romance
of natural history as the fixed habit of regarding every
separate colony of plants or animals as a tribe or com-
munity, necessarily restricted to intermarriage with
other members of the same group in the same place ; it
almost compels one to ask one's self in each case, how did
they first get here, and how did they come to be per-
manently severed from the main body of their species
elsewhere ? Now northern rock-cress is by origin a sub-
arctic plant, spreading along all the higher ranges of
Scandinavia, Russia, and Siberia, with a few isolated
outliers among the snowy mountains of southern Europe.
Here in Britain it occurs on the main summits of the
Scotch Highlands, descends more scantily into Wales or
Cumberland, and hardly loiters on upon a few bleak hill-
tops in Ireland among the Ulster heights. This moor

206 COLU* CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

on which I have discovered it to-day probably represents
its furthest southern colony in the British Isles. There
was a time, doubtless, when its ancestors spread uninter-
ruptedly over the whole of central Europe, from the
Caucasus and the Urals to the Asturias and the Kerry
hills ; but with the gradual and still continuous improve-
ment in the climate of the northern hemisphere (how-
ever a few bad seasons may prejudice us to the con-
trary), it has been driven to the arctic regions or to the
very tops of the higher mountains ; and it now survives
as a whole series of distinct colonies, between which in-
tercommunication can only be effected at rare intervals
(if at all) by seeds carried across the intervening warm
tracts through the agency of Alpine birds. So very
small a community as this upon whose territory I have
just lighted may be regarded as almost certainly self-
contained ; for the chances of an occasional cross are
here so remote as to represent really what mathemati-
cians would describe as a vanishing quantity.

Of course, it might plausibly be argued that this little
group of Alpine rock-cresses on this small patch of hill-
top may itself be due to such a solitary accident, and
that it may very likely have originated from a single
seed dropped on this congenial spot. That is quite a
possible explanation in any such individual case, and it
may, perhaps, even be the right one in this particular
instance. But no number of accidents of the kind could
ever account for the persistence with which almost every
higher summit in Great Britain or Ireland still presents
examples of little isolated groups belonging to the arctic
or glacial flora. We know from the analogy of oceanic
isles that a fauna or flora entirely dependent upon such
waifs and strays is always fragmentary and heteroge-
neous in the extreme ; it contains only those casual

SOME ALPINE CLIMBERS. 207

members of larger continental groups which are excep-
tionally easy of transport by wind or weather. But our
Scotch and Welsh mountains still preserve in one place
or another an immense number of the old glacial plants,
without respect to the size of their seeds, the edibility of
their fruits, or the suitability of their actual embryos to
conveyance by birds or other known means of transport.
There is no way of explaining the frequency of their oc-
currence except by supposing (what we have otherwise
every reason to believe) that they once spread over the
whole of the surrounding regions, and have been slowly
ousted from the lower districts by better adapted tem-
perate lowland forms, so that they now survive only on
the higher rocky points which alone suit their northern
constitutions. Moreover, they are also for the most
part moribund races ; they do not belong to dominant
types which are now making their way triumphantly
over the world, but to types left behind in the struggle
for existence ; and so, though they may still feebly live
on against intruders in their own ancestral haunts, they
are hardly likely to fight out the battle against other
species if casually dropped into the midst of already oc-
cupied and settled districts.

A great many of these stranded glacial flowers still
spread widely over the larger part of the Highlands or
of the Welsh hills, as in the case of the little creeping
mountain sibbaldia, which forms the main element in the
greensward of the Perthshire moors, or again as with the
Alpine hawkweed and the common crowberry, which
grow abundantly as far southward as the Merioneth
cairns. But a more interesting class of glacial stragglers
are those which now loiter only on one or two solitary
mountain-tops in Britain, and do not again appear until
we reach the higher Swiss pastures or the frost-bound

208 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

arctic plains. For example, there is a beautiful little
pink campion, the Alpine lychnis, which grows abun-
dantly only in high latitudes on the Scandinavian coasts,
or at great elevations among the Bernese Oberland ; but
which nevertheless manages still to hold its own in two
isolated patches in Britain — one on the summit of Little
Kilrannock, a Forfarshire mountain, and the other on
Hobcartin Fell in the English lake district. Our own
country has long been so thoroughly explored by collect-
ors that almost every separate station for each rare
flower has been familiarly known for two or three gen-
erations ; and thus it is quite possible to make a com-
plete list of such isolated glacial survivals, perched like
the European settlers from the " Bounty" in Pitcairn's
Island, each on its own domain of a few acres and sepa-
rated by hundreds or thousands of miles from its nearest
congeners in the arctic regions. A complete catalogue
would occupy many pages of a big book ; but two or
three of the more striking examples may be roughly
thrown together in a few words.

A little boggy sand wort, now dying out even in the
marshes of arctic Europe, drags on a lonely existence in
Britain only among the upland peat of Widdybank
Fell in Durham. Another arctic sandwort of mountain
pastures in the colder north survives on the limestone
cliffs of Ben Bulben in Sligo, and on a serpentine hill at
Unst in the Shetland Isles. One of the northern chick-
weeds still keeps up its race more bravely under adverse
circumstances ; for it spreads over all the tallest Scotch
mountains beyond the Breadalbane range, and also
maintains its footing in the Irish hills near Bantry ; but
if we may trust the ordinary analogies, it will gradually
be driven from most of these stations till at last it is
confined to one solitary chilly summit, where it will

SOME ALPINE CLIMBERS. 209

slowly die away from generation to generation. The
mountain known as the Sow of Atholl, in Perthshire,
has thus succeeded in preserving one of its ancient
glacial inhabitants, a blue heath known as Menziesia,
now rapidly verging to extinction. The Alpine astraga-
lus lingers on in the Clova and Braemar range ; its ally
the field oxytrope is also confined in Britain to a single
spot among the Clova hills. The saxifrages are a very
glacial group, and three or four of them are now dis-
tinctly becoming more and more rare in individuals.
One species at present lingers with us only on the sum-
mit of Ben Lawers ; another occurs on the same moun-
tain, as well as on Ben Nevis and Lochnagar ; a third is
confined to Ben Nevis and Ben Avers ; a fourth has
several Scotch and English colonies, but grows nowhere
in Ireland except on the mossy sides of Ben Bulben.
So, too, the Alpine sowthistle is confined in these islands
to Clova and Lochnagar, while the mountain Lloydia is
only known on three isolated summits in the Snowdon
range.

Almost all these plants are, in all probability, now
actually in course of extinction over the whole world ;
certainly they have long been growing scarcer and scarcer
in the British Isles. For example, the beautiful lady's-
slipper, by far the most striking of all northern orchids,
was once found in several parts of tliis country ; but it
now lingers only near Settle, in Yorkshire, and on a
single estate in Durham, where it is as carefully pre-
served by the owner as if it were pheasants or fallow
deer. The same thing is true of many other rare British
plants, and others, which once occupied a few scattered
mountain-tops, have already altogether disappeared.
Their retrogression can hardly be set down to the spread
of cultivation, for man has done little or nothing as yet

210 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

to interfere with crest of Ben Lomond or of Scawfell ;
we must rather account for it by the gradual secular
mitigation of the seasons and the slow retreat of the
Alpine types before the triumphant march of the central
European flora.

On the other hand, the mass of the Scotch highlands
is still occupied by a whole flourishing flora of glacial
plants, which will require many ages yet before they are
finally driven out by the intrusive phalanx of Germanic
species. Indeed, to this day it is not too much to say
that while the general aspect of vegetation in Devonshire
and Cornwall, or in the Killarney district, is now Span-
ish or Portuguese, and while the general aspect in Nor-
folk and Suffolk is German, the general aspect in the
Perthshire hills is arctic or Alpine. The most northern
and most glacial forms are to be found only on a few
scattered peaks ; but the slopes and the straths are still
richly clothed with more vigorous sub-arctic types ;
with winter-greens and bear-berries ; Alpine bartsia and
Alpine veronica ; the snowy gentian and the arctic
butterwort. Indeed, in a land of ptarmigans and
white hares we may say that the glacial epoch in its
final phase continues among us even yet.

XXXY1L

SOME AMERICAN COLONISTS.

THE commonest weed in this little English garden at
the present moment is a small creeping wood-sorrel,
with the characteristic shamrock leaf (for wood-sorrel,
not clover, is the true trefoil of St. Patrick and of Ire-
land), but bearing yellow blossoms instead of the pretty
lilac- veined petals of our own familiar spring species.
It is an interesting little plant in its own way ; for, con-
trary to all the natural traditions of emigration, it has
moved eastward, against the way of the sun, and has
come to us across the Atlantic from the broad central
plains of the American continent. There is something
strange in the notion of a weed from the New World
overrunning the fields of the Old, and living down the
native inhabitants of more anciently civilized Europe.
Of course, we all take it for granted that our own this-
tles, chickweeds, and groundsels ought rightfully to ac-
company British wheat and barley to every part of the
colonizable world ; indeed, the North American Indians
call our common English ribwort " white man's foot,"
because they say it springs up naturally wherever the
heel of the pale faces has trodden the soil. Sir Joseph
Hooker found our weedy English shepherd's purse—
itself -a colonist from Central Asia — growing abundantly
over a solitary antarctic islet ; and traced it finally to a
single seed which must have clung accidentally to the
spade used to dig the grave of a sailor, around which the
intrusive little plant was observed to flourish in great lux-

212 COLI^ CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

uriance. Sucli facts as these we all know and expect ;
it seems fit and proper that the familiar weeds of culti-
vation should follow civilized tillage on its widening
way over the world. But we are more surprised when
we find that a good many American weeds have also
forced their way eastward — against the stream, so to
speak — and have invaded the Old "World, en revanche,
with the potatoes and the maize, achieving such success
as to have lived down more than one of their European
compeers. In southern France and Italy the number of
these eastward immigrants is very considerable ; and
even in wetter and chillier England, a poor foster-
mother for children of the basking American plains, it is
far from being either small or unnoticeable. Such
cases are not in themselves at all more remarkable than
those of the phylloxera, which has already made good
its footing in Europe, or of the Colorado beetle, which
we are now endeavoring feebly to repel ; but they seem
more curious at first sight, because the aggressiveness of
fixed and unconscious plants is harder to understand than
the aggressiveness of locomotive and volitional animal
organisms.

Two of these American wood-sorrels, both with yellow
flowers, have now made themselves a permanent home
in England, and have even conquered their admission
within the exclusive lists of the British flora. One of
them has long been a universal weed in all hot climates
of the globe and in most temperate ones, having followed
the tobacco-plant to Syria and Java and accompanied the
tomato to all the warmer climates of Mediterranean
Europe. In England it appears chiefly in the southern
counties, and does not thrive well in the midlands or
the north. But some other American weeds have had
better luck among us ; such, for example, as the tiny

SOME AMEKICAK COLONISTS. 213

white claytonia, a straggling round-leaved succulent
plant, not unlike the garden purslanes. This queer
little tufted trailer, a familiar weed in American gardens,
has thickly overrun many parts of Lancashire, having
doubtless been landed at Liverpool. In another direc-
tion, it has effected an entry by the port of London, and
spread in abundance over many parts of Surrey, besides
making little excursions up the river to Oxfordshire and
attacking several of the neighboring counties on its on-
ward march. It is still rapidly advancing ; and though
but a naturalized alien, it threatens before many years
to become one of our most annoying and persistent
garden-weeds.

A rather pretty American balsam, with orange blos-
soms spotted with red, has in like manner made itself a
firm local habitation on the banks of the Wey and sundry
others among the Surrey streams. Then there is the
Canadian Michaelmas daisy, long completely naturalized
on the Continent, and now beginning to push its way
boldly along the grassy margin of southern English road-
sides. All these are thoroughgoing weeds, extremely
troublesome in America itself as well as in the European
countries where they have established themselves ; and
they are rendered dangerous by the fact that they come
from a very large continent mainly consisting of open
prairie, which insures them excellent weedy constitu-
tions, as the final survivors in an exceptionally severe
struggle for existence among highly adapted prairie
plants. They have come across to us by accident as mere
weeds, clinging to the tubers or roots of imported food-
plants. Somewhat different is the case of ornamental
blossoms like the mimulus, originally planted in flower-
gardens, but now fairly established as an escape in boggy
or marshy ground. Of these handsome straylings we

214 coLitf CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

have several acclimatized varieties ; but they do not
spread like the regular weeds, nor have they the same
strength of constitution which enables the claytonia and
the Michaelmas daisy to compete successfully with the
old-established weeds of cultivation in southern Europe.
Even more interesting, however, than these aliens,
which owe their introduction directly .or indirectly to
man, are the real natural colonists from America, which
are found sparingly in many places along our exposed
western coasts, from the Hebrides to Cornwall. Many
of them, no doubt, have been acclimatized in Britain
long before the discovery of America by the Spaniards ;
for all the evidence goes to suggest that their seeds must
have been carried across the Atlantic by the agency of
sea-birds, or must have been wafted over in the crevices
of drift-wood, or must have been washed ashore by the
favoring current of the Gulf Stream. For example, in
the lakes and tarns of the Isle of Skye, Coll, and the
outer Hebrides, as well as in the shallow loughs of Con-
nemara and Kerry, a slender graceful water-plant with
pellucid leaves grows abundantly over the soft mud, and
forms a tufted waving carpet above the smooth shining
bottom, with its white jointed fibres and grass-like
blades. This pretty weed belongs to a family otherwise
wholly unrepresented in Europe, but common in all the
still waters of America. Clearly, from the nature of its
distribution here — only along the extreme western belt
of the British Isles, where the coast lies fully exposed to
the long wash of the Atlantic — it must have reached our
shores by some such casual accident as those which have
peopled oceanic islands, like the Azores, with their scanty
fauna and flora. Its seeds must have clung to the legs of
wading birds blown eastward before a northern cyclone,
or else its roots must have been torn up entire and cast

SOME AMERICAN COLONISTS. 215

upon some shelving Irish coast by westerly winds. Sim-
ilarly, in a few Connemara pools, as well as in two or
three Continental stations, another pretty little American
water-plant, classically named the naiad, has long grown
in isolated colonies, cut off by the Atlantic from the
main body of its race in Massachusetts and Labrador. A
beautiful small white orchid, too, distantly allied to our
common English lady's-tresses, abounds all over the east-
ern half of North America ; but in Europe, it is known
only in a few bogs in County Cork, where the ardor of
modern botanists is rapidly putting an end to its brief
European career. This case presents some features of
peculiar interest, because the Irish specimens seem to
have been settled in the country for a very long period,
sufficient to have set up an incipient tendency toward the
evolution of a new species ; for they had so far varied
before their first discovery by botanists that Lindley con-
sidered them to be distinct from their American allies ;
and even Dr. Bentham originally so classed them, though
ho now admits the essential identity of both kinds. The
blue Bermuda grass-lily, a'gain, a common and extremely
graceful American meadow- weed, is found in one place
only in Europe ; and that is near Woodford, in Galway,
where it does not appear to have been introduced by
human agency.

It would even have been possible before the days of
Columbus for a philosophical botanist of the modern
type (had one then been imaginable) to have predicted
the existence of the American continent from the occur-
rence of so many strange plants in isolated situations on
the western shores of Britain and Scandinavia, lie would
rightly have argued that these unfamiliar weeds, not
belonging to any part of the European flora, and some-
times even differing wholly from any known family of

216 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

European plants, must have come with the prevailing
winds and currents from some unknown land beyond the
sea. That the plants in question grew there even then
is highly probable, because most of them bear every sign
of great antiquity : certainly, they are not likely to have
been introduced by man, since the larger number are
mere inconspicuous water-plants, which could not come
over with cultivated seeds or tubers, and which would
not, of course, be deliberately planted in gardens. On
the other hand, when once introduced by chance, they
would be sure to gain a firm footing ; because America,
with its enormous stretches of fresh water, in rivers,
lakes, and innumerable scattered ponds, is far richer in
strong and well-endowed aquatic weeds than relatively
hilly and lakeless Europe. This peculiarity is well seen
in the career of the Canadian pondweed, which was first
introduced into England as a botanical specimen in 1847,
and rapidly spread through canals and sluggish waters
over the whole of Britain. No European weed can stand
against it ; and what makes its progress the more re-
markable is that it seldom or' never seeds in this coun-
try, propagating entirely by its lissom floating rootless
branches. Still, the area over which it has made its
way, and the centres from which it started — Yorkshire,
Leicestershire, Berwick, and Edinburgh — clearly show
(what is otherwise well known) that it owes its introduc-
tion to human means : while the spontaneous occurrence
of the other water-plants in a few lonely portions of the
western coasts equally suggests that they owe their trans-
plantation solely to birds or ocean-currents.

XXXVIII.

THE WEEDS OF BEDMOOR.

Our on the red moor here the sea-breeze blows wet
and misty, and the brine may almost be tasted in the
fine spray that floats around us, covering the low strag-
gling vegetation of the salt marsh with a thin film of
incrusting crystals. For there are moors and moors in
England ; and this particular Bedmoor by no means
fulfils the prior expectations that might be formed of it
from its high-sounding name. To our early English an-
cestors, in fact, a moor meant almost any tract of wild or
uninclosed ground ill fitted by nature for human habita-
tion or tillage. It was as indefinite and as expansive in
sense as the Australian word "bush," or the Norman
equivalent " forest." So in Yorkshire a moor means a
high stretch of undulating heath-covered rock ; whereas
in Somerset it means a low flat level of former marsh-
land, reclaimed and drained by means of numerous
"rhines" — as local farmers still call them, with fond
clinging to an old Celtic common name, which has else-
where grown into the specific Teutonic title of the most
German among European rivers. Bedmoor belongs
rather to the latter type : a little triangular patch of
Dorset coast swamp, cut off from the sea by a narrow
belt of coarse shingle, and intersected by numerous tidal
ditches, with occasional flat expansions of fathomless
muddy ooze. It is not a beautiful place, truly, in its
main features ; and yet it revels in a wealth of color that
a painter dare hardly imitate, and a profusion of ihinutte

218 COLIN- CLOUT'S CALENDAR,

detail that even a Dutch painter con Id never aream of
reproducing on his toilsome canvas.

I spoke just now of Bedmoor as red ; and the epithet
is really the only one that will exactly fit it at the pres-
ent moment. It is not purple, like a side of Brae-
mar covered thickly with a great sheet of flowering
Scotch heather ; nor yet pink, like a bit of the Lizard
promontory, clothed from end to end with the flesh-
colored panicles of the Cornish heath ; nor is it pale
mauve, like a patch of some midland common richly
overspread with our ordinary little English ling : it is
simply red and nothing else, crimson with the brilliant
hue of the Virginia creeper in Magdalen cloisters when
the frost first catches its dying foliage in the opening
days of October term. Not that the whole expanse is
red alike all over : the crimson bits spread here and there
in great patches between taller herbage of mingled green
and gray. At first sight, even those who know and love
the marshy lands would hardly guess what it is that gives
these exquisite passages of warm color to the quiet vege-
tation of Bedmoor ; but when one descends upon the
low-lying land itself, the crimson patches reveal them-
selves as semi-tidal mud -flats overgrown by two common
little seaside weeds, glasswort and sea-blite. Even in
their green summer dress they are curious and interest-
ing plants ; but when the autumn v hues begin to tinge
them in great masses, as on these muddy reaches among
the salt marsh, they come out in a perfect blaze of deep
crimson such as no other English foliage can ever equal.
It is not often, however, that they grow together over
large enough spaces, unmixed with other weeds, to
form the one main element in the coloration of a con-
siderable tract : and what makes Bedmoor at this moment
so beautiful and interesting is just the fact that the inun-

THE WEEDS OF -BEDMOOR. 219

dated levels where the glasswort and the sea-blite love
to crawl among the soft ooze are here so large and con-
tinuous, stretching long arms in and out among the rank
brown grasses and fluffy aster-heads that form the herb-
age of the intervening drier belts. A sluice at the mouth
of the tidal backwater shuts off the sea from these natur-
ally flooded branches of the little channel ; so that the
succulent weeds have it all their own way upon the con-
genial mud, where they creep and bask in crimson lux-
uriance without fear of competition from the drier plants
of the surrounding meadow.

Taken in its minutest details, the vegetation of Bed-
moor is quaint and interesting to the highest degree.
Only a pair of skinny horses eat down the taller herb-
age ; while a. few lean, lank pigs of dolorous aspect grub
hopelessly for tubers along the edge of the slimy ooze.
The red weeds themselves are some of the strangest
among our native English plants — succulent, cactus-look-
ing seaside denizens, which collect quantities of alkaline
material from the saturated soil in whose mud they grow,
and which used formerly therefore to be burned for
barilla, in the days when England was more dependent
upon home produce for feeding her industries than she is
now. That is how one of them got its popular name of
glasswort. As they grow together on the soft bed of the
dried pool — Oxford clay well kneaded with salt water — -
the two weeds look quite indistinguishable from one
another ; for both share the common succulence of seaside
plants, familiar to most of us in samphire and saltwort,
and both have turned to the very selfsame shade of red
under the influence of their identical conditions. When
you pull them and examine them closely, however, you
see that there are marked differences in their flowers and
their mode of growth. Both belong by origin to the

COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

goosefoot tribe ; but glasswort is far more degenerate
in character than its very similar neighbor. Sea-blite,
in fact, can still boast the possession of distinct leaves
and flowers, though the leaves are reduced to mere
shapeless fleshy branch-like masses, and the flowers are
scarcely more than small greenish pulpy knobs. But
glasswort has gone much farther on the path of degra-
dation ; it has lost its leaves altogether, while its flowers
have sunk almost indistinguishably into the general mass
of its stem. The whole plant looks, accordingly, like a
series of jointed pieces, with a little pyramidal cluster of
three sunken knobs, representing what were once blos-
soms, at each joint of the articulated branches. Alone
among English weeds, it approaches somewhat in quaint-
ness and oddity of arrangement the great leafless cactuses
and euphorbias of tropical deserts.

The other plants that cover the sides of the moor are al-
most as interesting in their own way as the crimson creep-
ing weeds that spread over the mudbank. The edge of the
watercourses is fringed with feathery spear-grass, its cot-
ton-tufted seeds just protruding from the purple scales
that hide them. A few late asters linger on in blossom
among them, with lilac rays and yellow centres, like
Michaelmas daisies ; and thick fleshy leaves, often pic-
kled by country housewives as a poor substitute for that
almost forgotten relish, samphire. For the most part,
however, the asters are now fully in fruit : each head
covered by a fluffy mass of gossamer- winged seeds, that
fly away by hundreds with every breath of the misty sea-
breeze. No wonder they grow by hundreds on the flats
here ; seeing that each head produces a hundred seeds,
and each seed flies away lightly on its own account to
find a fitting resting-place by some similar pool or tidal
hollow. On the bank by the confining shingle beach the

THE WEEDS OF BEDMOOB.

strawberry clover spreads its ripening heads, which adopt
the exactly opposite tactics of protective devices against
animal invaders ; for the seeds are here inclosed in a little
swollen network of calyx- veins, which redden as they
ripen, giving the head a rough resemblance to a rasp-
berry rather than to the sister fruit from which it takes
its popular name. Altogether, the flora of Bedmoor is
rich and tempting. Even the casual passer-by pauses
on the causeway that carries the road across the moor to
admire the brilliant coloring of crimson glasswort and
yellow ragwort : the patches of red are on too large a
scale not to attract the least observant eye : but to
those who love pottering about, with all attention fixed
on the beautiful things below, it is a very paradise of
native seaside vegetation.

XXXIX.

AFTER a long hunt on a gloomy autumn morning
among the prehistoric earthworks which crown the East
Cliff, I have come at last across a genuine relic which
well repays me for the trouble and discomfort of grub-
bing in the loose surface-soil amid fog and drizzle.
For, unless I mistake, the object which I now hold in
my hand, rather grimed with clay and age, but still
showing traces of its polished surface through the thick
crust of earth, is nothing less than the identical hammer
of the great god Thor himself. It is, in fact, a shapely
flint axe belonging to the later Stone Age, when men
had learned to grind and smooth their tools or weapons ;
and it once formed a possession of the ancient Euskarian
chief whose remains still lie unmolested in the great bar-
row which forms the central point of the earthwork.
For, though the country people call the rough inclosure
"»Caesar's Camp," an archaeological eye recognizes at
once that its irregular outline could never have belonged
to one of the square and symmetrical Roman stations ;
while the shape of the barrow, which is long instead of
round, shows clearly that it was first erected by the
aboriginal stone-using race, not by the later and intrusive
bronze- weaporied Aryan Celts. If there were any doubt
at all about the matter, this stone hatchet, which is
thoroughly Euskarian in type, would set the question at
rest in a moment.

But why should I identify this old neolithic weapon
with the mythical hammer of the Scandinavian god

THOR'S HAitMEK, 223

Thor ? The Euskarians are separated in our island
from the Anglo-Saxons and Danes by all the long inter-
val of British and Roman times. How can a polished
hatchet of the later Stone Age have anything to do
with the chief deity of a race who peopled Britain a
couple of thousand years after the hatchet itself had
been safely buried beside the dead chieftain in yonder
barrow ? Well, the connection is far closer than one
would at first sight be tempted to suppose. We must
remember that philology, though it tells us a great deal
about the origin of myths, does not tell us everything.
Popular superstitions, in fact, do not as a rule gather
about language at all, but about certain tangible and
material objects, supposed to have a mystical virtue.
It may be a crooked sixpence, or a horseshoe, or a blood-
stone, or the charms on a watch-chain. It may be a
standing stone, or an oak, or a mistletoe bough. It may
be Dr. Dee's crystal, or the Lee penny, or the Luck of
Edenhall, or the Stone of Ardvoirloch. But whatever
it is, it is usually a definite thing, to be seen and handled
by all : something, as a rule, which in some way excites
one's curiosity, or suggests by the mode of its occurrence
a supernatural origin.

Now, objects dug up from the ground, and not known
to be of human workmanship, are specially apt to meet
with such superstitious reverence. Among them the
commonest, in Europe at least, are stone weapons. We
all know already by what gradual steps the neolithic ar-
rows came to be regarded as elf bolts or fairy darts ; but
a somewhat different belief grew up about the larger and
more formidable-looking stone axes of the same primi-
tive people. It is a universal idea among the scientifi-
cally ignorant that lightning consists of a material
weapon — the thunderbolt. Hence all large weapons, or

824 COLIK CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

objects which look like weapons, found underground,
are popularly known as thunderbolts. In districts
where big species of belemnites — the bones of a fossil
cuttle-fish — occur in any numbers, these lance-like pet-
rifications receive that name. But all over England,
France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Holland, and Italy,
the polished stone axes of the Enskariau aborigines are
also known as thunderbolts, and believed to have fallen
from the sky. Even in countries where the Stone Age
has lasted till a recent period the hatchets are already
regarded in this light, and viewed with superstitious rev-
erence accordingly. The Jamaican negroes thus re-
gard the beautiful greenstone axes of the old Caribs ;
and the Canadian farmers give the same name to the
finished weapons of the Hurons and the Objibways. In
Japan, Java, Burmah, and West Africa the selfsame
belief holds good. Everywhere the stone axe becomes a
thunderbolt in the popular estimation.

"When the old Teutonic and Scandinavian hordes sep-
arated from their Aryan ancestors in Central Asia, they
carried away with them to their new homes in the forests
of Germany or by the shores of the Baltic the primitive
religion of the Aryan race. But the great sky-god of the
Aryans, the Sanskrit Dyaus, the Greek Zeus, the
Eoman Jupiter, whose main function it was to wield
the lightnings and gather the clouds, became known and
remembered among the Teutonic races as Thunder only.
His Anglo-Saxon name of Thunor — from which comes
our thunder — is in High German Donner, and in Scan-
dinavian Thor. But the position of his sacred day in
the order of the week shows his identity with Zeus ; for
Thursday, originally Thunres dceg, answers of course to
Jovis dies or Jeudi. Among the Teutons, however,
Thunor or Thor is always armed with a hammer ; and

THOR'S HAMMER. 225

this hammer, I venture to suggest, is really the stone
axe of the aboriginal Euskarians. Men who found such
axes in the ground have everywhere leaped at once to
the conclusion that they were thunderbolts. What more
natural, then, than to figure the god Thunder as armed
with such an axe ? In fact, we get direct evidence on
the subject in the Anglo-Saxon literature itself ; for in
the " Exeter Book" the lightning is described as the
" weapon of the car-borne god, Thunor ;" while in
another contemporary poem the thunder is described as
threshing " with its fiery axe." When we put all these
facts together, I hardly see how we can avoid the infer-
ence that the early English and Norsemen formed their
conception of Thor's hammer from the stone hatchets
which they knew as thunderbolts.

On the other hand, it is curious to note how the two
conceptions of the stone hatchet, as the thunderbolt
and as a fairy relic, have lingered on side by side. In
Scotland, for example, these old weapons are supersti-
tiously cherished in families as talismans for keeping
away misfortunes and curing disease. This shows that
they are still vaguely remembered as belonging to the
elves, who send sickness and calamities, and whose influ-
ence may be averted by possession of an object which
once belonged to them. They are believed, in particu-
lar, to assist the birth of children — a function with
which fairies are always closely connected — and to
increase the milk of cows, which fairies are often known
spitefully to dry up. But then they are also regarded
by these very people as thunderbolts, and supposed to
protect the houses in which they are kept against light-
ning. It is an interesting fact that such heathen supersti-
tions still exist in Presbyterian Scotland more perhaps
than in any other part of the British Isles.

226 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR.

Finally, I should much like to know whether stone
hatchets have anything to do with those places in Eng-
land which are still called after Thunor. There is a
Thundersfield in Surrey, a Thundersley in Essex, a
Thursfield in Staffordshire, a Thursby in Cumberland,
and a Thursford in Norfolk, all of which take their titles
from the Anglo-Saxon Thunor or the Danish Thor.
Near Thursley, in Surrey, is a Thunder Hill. Now, as
we see that the names of the fairies cling about those
places where stone arrows or elf-bolts are abundant, it
would be interesting to learn whether any large find of
stone hatchets has ever been discovered at any of these
towns or hills, or whether any long barrows occur in
their neighborhood. Of course it is possible that the
names may only be due to some old heathen temple or
meeting-place ; but it is also possible that they may be
due to actual visible tokens of Thunor's presence found
upon the spots in question.

INDEX.

Almond blossoms, 37.

America, how its existence might have
been predicted before its discov-
ery, 215.

April showers, 7.

Asparagus, time of blossoming, 176.
origin of, 176,

description of the wild, 177.
a species of lily, 178.
butcher's broom a close ally of, 179.

B.

Bedmoor, the weed of, 217.

what makes red, 218.

description of the red weed of, 219.
Bees seeking honey, 12.

their cnlendxr, 2ft.
Berries, varieties of, 119.
Bluebell of Scotland, 25.
British isles, their number, 71.

names of, 72.

vegetation in, 73.

animals in, 74.

Brambles, different species, 127.
Butterworth, the weather it loves, 129.

deadly to insects, 132.

a distant cousin to the primrose,

134.
Buttercups, 42.

C.

Charlock, description of, 154.
Cherries, the first ripe, 117.
Chickweed. where found, 208.
Claverton Down, 20.
Climbers, Alpine, 205.

in what, countries found, 206.

their retrogression accounted for,

209.
Clover, blooms of, 76.

study of, 77.

bees in, 78.

Huxley on, 78.

red and white, 81.
Coltsfoot, 41.

Cowslips, how they differ from prim-
roses, 9.
Crucifer plants, variety of, 156.

D.

Dandelion, the clocks of, 83,
description of, 84.
differing from daisy, 84.

Darwin's observation on tront, 86.
Dog-rose, an earnest of summer, 123.

bow it got its name, 123.

seventeen distinct species, 126.

how it differs from the downy

rose, 126.

E.

England, change of climate in, 16.

P.
Fore Acre, 8.

origin of the word, 8.
Flowers in July, 111.
Forest, the submerged, 66.

Girnldus Cumbrensis's description

of, 67.

the date of, 67.

the depth of, 68.
Fruit, coloring of, 48.

G.

Geranium described, 146.

where they first grew, 147.

developed from a primitive ances-
tor, 149.

Geologists, views of, 22.
Gianrs grave, the, description of, 76.
Godshill, seen plainly a sign of rain, 56.
Grasses, the flowering of, 60.

number of species in Britain, 61.

description, 62.

adaptation to particular station,

65.

secrets of their success, 65.
Grouse, origin of, 188.

Wallace, his observations on, 189.

willow, changes its coat in winter,

190.

elements affect the color of, 191.

H.

Hare, the blue, of Scotland, 138.

its geographical distribution, 136.

change of color, 138

the Irish, variety of, 139.
Hay, ingredients of, 101.
Hayfielcf, foes in the, 94.
Haymaking described, 100.
Horse-chestnuts, 23.
Hops, blossoming an evidence of coming

autumn, 159.

graceful and beautiful, 160,

formed for climbing, 162.

practical interest of, 168.

228

INDEX.

Humming-bird, 51 .

points of convergence with sun-
bird, 53.

Hyacinths, wild, 24.

description of, 26.

I.

Insects, food of tropical, 51.
J.

Jerdon, Dr., his study of birds of India*
52.

L.

Lambs, spring, 36.
Leaf, the green, 55.
Leaves, what they are, 58.

M.

May flies on Venlake, 30.
Meadow-brome described, 68
Mole, the, at home, lOtt.

description of, 106.

food of, 108.

fortress of the, 110.

N.

Nasturtium, ancestry of, 150.
P.

Peaches, where they originally belonged,

195.
Pears, the ancestry of, 200.

description tree in southern

Europe, 202.

leaves of Ihe tree depcribed, 208.
Plants, why they disperse their seed, 86.

wild, how changed, 103.

development of, 104, 121.

insect-eating, 133.
Plnms, family to which they belong,

193.
PJnm trees, why they have lost their

tboriie, 197.

Pond-weed, its introduction into Eng-
land, 216.
Primrose time, 7.

R.

Rabbit, a snow-white wild, 135.
Rain on the root crops, 152.
Rhnbarb, 45.
Rodents, a winter's supply of, 90.

S.

Seedtime, early. 83.

Shelley quoted, 166.

Sloes, wnere they grow largest and
sweetest, 195.

Solomon quoted, 160.

Sorby, Mr., what he has shown, 47.

Spring, bepinninffs of, 19.
flowers, 40.

Spurge, on Oaverton Down. 22.

Spencer, Herbert, observatton *& ani-
mals, 38.

Squirrels, a nest of, 89.

in what they differ from field-
mouse and nuthatch, 89.
Summer, a trip in, described, 71.
Sundew, Swmburne's lines about, 130.
Sundown, blood-ei;cking properties of,

13U
Swallows, their return, 13.

food of, 14.

time of their return, 14.

fearlessness of, 50.
Swifts, the departure of, 165.

time seems longer to them than to

man, 166.

action of the, 167.

nests of the, 168.

increase of the, 168.
Selborn, the naturalist, puzzled by the,

169.

T.

Thistledown described, 140.

visitors of, 142.

self -propagating, 143.
Thor, the hammer of, 222.

the significance of, 223.

the aborigines1 ideas of, 224.

derivation of thunder from, 224.

how weapons of are cherished In

Scotland, 225.

names of places derived from. 226.
Trees, the actual life of, 57.
Trout, the food and description of, 30.

V.

Venlake, meaning of, 24.
Vine, vetch, the description of, 111.

varieties of, 113.

leaves of, 115.

W.

Wallace, his views of humming-birds, 52.
Weismann, Dr., on swallow migration,

17.
Weeds, waterside, gracefulness of, 170.

flowers of, 17) .

progenitors of, 173.
- varieties of, 174.

the aggressiveness of American,

212.
Wheat, the kerning of the, 182.

weeds among the, 182.

sweetness of fresh, 183.

the pedigree of, 184.

coach-grass a epecies of, 184.

goat-grass a wild form of, 185.

Lake, its antiquity, 1&5.

Lake, its extinction in England, 186.
Wild animals, extinction of in Britain, 70
Wood-sorrel, a trefoil of St. Patrick, 211'

a colonist from Central Asia, 211..

Y.

Yellow bird's-nest a rare plant in Eng-
land, 95.

Yellow-rattle, foe in the hayfield, 94.
a description of, 05.
the relations 'of, SB.
the seifris of, 0&.

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What Our Girls Ought to Know.

-BY-
MARY J. STUDLEY, M. D.

261 pp., 12 mo. Cloth $1.00.

A most practical and valuable book; should be placed in the hands of every
girl.

Intelligently read, it will accomplish much in the elevation of the human race.

It is full of information which every girl ought to know.

Parents. Teachers, Clergymen and others who have the education of children,
or who have occasion to address, in sermon or lecture, girls, will find this book
'crammed rvith suggestiveness."

The authoress, Mary J. Studley, M. D., was a physician of large practice and
great success. She was a graduate, resident physician and teacher ot the Natural
Sciences in the State Normal School, Framingham. Mass.; also graduate of the
"Woman's Medical College, New York; Dr. Emily Blackwell, Secretary of the
Faculty, and Dr. Willard Parker. Chairman of the Board of Examiners.

IS THOUOT OF IT.

is a practical book, and will do good if
thoughfully read."

Montreal Daily Witness says:
" It is a valuable book for girls."

Mwth .dist Recorder, Pittsburg.
says: "It should be placed in the
hands of every girl."

Commercial, Cincinnati, says:
"Dr. Mary Studley was a gifted woman.
Her knowledge was ripe. The book is a
good one."

School Journal, New York, says:
"Every sensible mother will wish to
place a book like this in her daughter's
hands."

New York World says: " Sensi-
able essays on subjects which the au-
thor has taught in the schoolroom,
written in a style that is clear and pro-
perly chosen for girls."

Boston Woman's J

says: "It derives its principal value
from the fact that Dr. Studley was a
firm believer in the possibility and duty
of so regulating the details of every-day
life as to secure and preserve physical
health and vigor, and that such a course
is essential as a foundation for the
higher moral and intellectual develop-
ment."

Union Argus, Brooklyn, says: "It

Journal of Commerce, New

York, says: " This is a capital book."

TALKS AND STORIES ABOUT HEROES AND HOLIDAYS.

Price, cloth, illustrated, $1.25.; paper, 60 cents.
This book contains most interesting talks to boys and girls by
many well-known men, such as Drs. Cuyler, Storrs, Newton, and
others, and is richly illustratcd by forty new cuts and many inci-
dent and object-illustrations, making it a beautiful gift book. The
addresses are nearly ell written in a cheerful and happy style.

WHAT IS SAID OF IT.

Illustrated Christian Weekly

says: "A good many bright and suggest-
ive things will be found herein."

Central Presbyterian says: "A
beautiful present for a child, a parent,
a teacher, or a preacher.'

The Advance says: "The ser-
mons are plain, practical, easily under-
stood and full of illustration."

Bible 'JVacher says: "A very
interesting book for the home circle."

American Literary Church-

man says: "Are well adapted to ar.
rest attention."

Consrejr itionalist says: "Spec*
irnens of the work which many pastors
are doing week by week for the children
of their congregations."

National Gazette says: "Both
edifying and entertaining."

Gospel in All 1*ands says:
"Brief, racy sermons full of the Gospel
and common sense."

The above works ivitt be sent by mail, postage j>*idt on receipt of the price.

PUBLICATIONS OF FUNK <£ WAGNALLS, NEW YORK. 236

«' Tbe moat important and practical work of tne age on th.«
Psalms."- SCHAFF.

SIX VOLUMES KOW READY.

-SPURCEON'S GREAT LIFE WORK

THE TREASURY OF DAVID I

To be published in seven octavo volumes of about 4=70 pages each,
uniformly bound, and making a library of 3,300 pages,

in handy form for reading and reference.

It is published simultaneously with, axid contains the exact matter of,
the English Edition, which has sold at $4.00 per volume
in this country — $28.00 for the work when com*
pleted. Our edition is in every way pref-
erable, and is furnished at

ONE-HALF THE PBICE OF

THE ENGLISH

EDITION.

Price, Per VoL $2.CO.

"Messrs. Funk <Sr» Wagnalls have entered into an arrangement with
me to reprint THE TREASUR Y OF DA VID in, the United States. I
have every confidence in them that they will issue it correctly and worthily.
It has been the great literary work of my life, and I trust it will be as
kindly received in America as in England. I wish for Messrs. Funk sue-
eess in a venture which must involve a great risk and much outlay.

"Dec. 8, i88r. C. ff. SPURGE ON."

Volumes L, DL, HL, IV., V. and VL are now ready; volume
VII., which completes the great work, is now tinder the hand of the
author. Subscribers can consult their convenience by ordering all
the volumes issued, or one volume at a time, at stated intervals, until
the set is completed by the delivery of Volume VEL

From the large number of hearty commendations of this import-
ant work, we give the following to indicate the value set upon the
by

EMINENT THEOLOGIANS AND SCHOLARS.

Philip Schaff, F>.D., the Eminent
Commentator and the President of the
American Bible Revision Committee,
aays: " The most important and prac-

tical work of the age on the Psalter \*
• The Treasury of David,' by Charles H
Spurgeon. It is fall of the force and

genius of this celebrated preacher, and

(OVER.)

above work* will be sent fy mail, fostae< }*id, OK receipt *f tiu frit*.

PUBLICATIONS OF FUNK A WAGNALLS, NEIV YORK.

rich in selections from the entire range
of literature."

•William M. Taylor, D.Do

New York says: ' In the exposition of
the heart 'THB TBEASimy OF DAVID* is
sui generis, rich in experience and pre-
eminently devotional. The exposition
is alwavs fresh. To the preacher it is
especially suggestive."

John Hall, D.D., New York,
says: -'There are two questions that
must interest every expositor of tha
Divine Word. What does a particular
passage mean, and to what use is it to
be applied in public teaching? In the
department of the latter Mr. Spur-
geon's great work on the Psalms is
without an equal. Eminently practical
in his own teaching, he has collected in
these volumes the best thoughts of the
best minds on the Psalter, andesre-
cially of that great body .loosely grouped
together as the Puritan divines. lam
heartily glad that by arrangements,
satisfactory to all concerned, tl e Messrs.
Funk & Wa^nalls are to bring mis gr, at
work within tha reach ot ministers
everywhere, as the English edition is
necessarily expensive. I wish the
highest success to the enterprise."

-William Ormlston. !>.*>., New

York, says: " I consider « THB TBEASUBY.
OF DAVID' a work cf surpassing excel-
lence.of inestimable value to every stu-
dent of the J salter. It will prove a
standard work on the Psalms for all
time. The instructive introductions,
the racy original expositions, the
numerous quaint illustrations gath-
ered from wide and varied fields, and
the suggestive sormonic hints, render
the volumes in valuable to allpreacheis,
and indispensable to every minister's
library. All who delight in reading the
Psalois — and what Christian does not?
— will prize this work. It is a rich
cyclopaedia of the literature of these
ancient odes."

Tneo, li» fwyler, D.D., Brook-
lyn, says: " I have used Mr. Spurgeon's
•THB TREASURY. OF DAVID' for three
years, and found it worthy of its name.
Whoso goeth in there will find ' rich
spoils.' At both my visits to Mr. S. he
spoke with much enthusiasm of this
undertaking as one of his favorite
methods of enriching himself and
others."

JesieB. Thomas, D.D , Brook-
lyn, says: " I havo the highest concep-

tion of the sterling worth of all Mr.
Spurgeon's publications, and I incline
to regard his TREASURY OF DAVID' as
having received more of his loving
labor than any other. I regard its
publication at a lower price as a preat
service to American Bible fctudents."

New York Observer says: " A
rich compendium of Buggestivo com-
ment upon the richest devotional
poetry ever given to mankind. '

Th« Congregational!*!, Bos-
ton, says: " As a devout and spiritually
suggestive work, it is meeting with
the warmest approval and receiving
the hearty commendation of the most
distinguished divines."

United Presbyterian, Pitts-
burg, Pa., says: "It is unapproached
as a commentary on the Psalms. It is
of equal value to ministers and lay-
men— a quality that works of the kind
rarely possess."

North American, Philadelphia,
Pa.: says: "Will find a place in the
library of every minister who knows
how to appreciate a good thing."

New York Independent rays:
" He has ransacked evangelical litera-
ture, and comes forth, like Jessica from
her father's house, 'gilded with
ducats' and rich plunder in the shape
of good and helpful quotations.'

New York Tribune says: "For
the great majority of readers who seek
in the Psalms those practical lessons
in which they are so rich, and those
wonderful interpretations of heart-life
and expression of emotion in which
they anticipate the New Testament, we
know of no book like this, nor as good.
It is literally a ' Treasury.' "

S. S. Times says: "Mr. Fpurgeon'a
style is simple, direct and perspicuous,
often reminding one of the matchless
prose of Bunyan."

West mi Christian Advocate,
Cincinnati, 0., says: "The price is ex-
tremely moderate for EO Jarge and im-
portant a work. * * * We have ex-
amined this volume with care, and we
are greatly pleased with the plan of
execution."

Christian Herald says: "Con-
tains more felicitous illustrations,
more valuable eermonic hints, than can
be found in all other works on the
same book put together."

The above works lutll be sent by mail, postage paid, on receipt of the price*

PUBLICATIONS OF FU.\'K &-' WAGNALLS, NEW

207

Three New Books, by Dr. Jos.

Parker, are included in our midsum-
mer offer. Bpurgeon speaks most high-
ly of these volumes. £ee several special
offers in March number HOMUJETIC
MOK r B L <•. Price 25 cents.

Fev. G. W. Martin, Monta,
Utah, says: '•! inclose you $60 as
r gainst 'Bad Books.' Thank God for
such opportunity of labor as the past
day and one-half have been! You can-
not now estimate results in this West-
ern town. Go onl I expect to send
more names."

The Publishers of the Lon-

don. Chronicle (Dr. Joseph Parkers
paper) write us: "We have shown
your Henry Ward Beecher book to a
number of London publishers. They
declare that they do not believe any
publisher in London couid have made
so good plates." The book is a fine
specimen of the printer's art. The
price of the Beecher book is un-
changeably fixed at $3.00. Our agents
are selling hundreds of copies at that
price. The Cincinnati Commercial-Cra-
zette pronounces it one of the beat
biographical books that has appeared
for years.

Eastern Proverbs and Emblems.

—BY—
Rev. A. LONG, member of the Bengal Asiatic Society.

8vo, 280 pp. Price, cloth, $1.00.

Illustrated Old Truths — selected from ovfr 1,000 volumes, some
very rare, and to be consulted only in libraries in India, Russia and
other parts of the Continent, or in the British Museum. All are
classified under subjects, enabling teichers and preachers to fix in
the school, the pulpit, or the press, great spiritual truths by means
of emblems and illustrations drawn from the depths of the popular
mind. This book is the opening of a rich storehouse of emblems
and proverbs.

The object of this book is— To group together, under appropriate
heads, Oriental proverbs illustrative of familiar truths.

To select from Holy Writ prominent themos, and compare them
with similar Oriental expressions.

To show thereby the oneness of human experiences under widely
different circumstances and beliefs.

To elucidate the significance of natural phenomena found in
Biblical proverbs.

To explain, in a trite and winsome manner, the meaning and
usage of various customs in the Orient.

Tfds book is — Entertaining to tho general reader, and evincing in
a forcible manner the superiority ot the Scriptures over uninspired
writings.

'J he ttn.s'on Post says: "A quaint,
curious work; very interesting. Shows,
in a wonderful manner, how widely
scattered nations, under similar circum-
stances, evolve, from their own ex-
perience, similar conclusions. The

identity of human nature is the great
truth taught."
'I he Ciiristian. Ailvorate, New

York, says: "The proverbs are well
chosen — wonderful condensations of
wisdom. A valuable and useful work."

. Thf. above works will be sent by mat", postage j>aidt on receipt of the Price.

£38 PUBLICATIONS W FUNK A WAGlfALLff, JTKW YORK;

Fulton's Replies.

Punishment of Sin Eternal. Three sermons in reply to Beecher,
Farrar and Ingersoll. By JUSTIN D. FULTON, D.D. 8vo, paper,
10 cents.

Gilead: An Allegory.

GUead; or, The Vision of All Sonls' Hospital. An Allegory. By
Rev. J. HYATT SMITH, Congressman from New York. Revised
edition. 12mo, cloth, 350 pp., $1.00.

Bodet's Commentary on Luke.

A Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke. By F. GODET, Doctor
and Professor of Theology, Neufchatel. Translated from the
Second French Edition. With Preface and Notes by John Hall,
D.D. New edition, printed on heavy paper. 2 vols., paper,
584 pp. (Standard Series, octavo, Nos. 51 and 52), $2.00; 1 TO!.,
8vo, cloth, $2.50.

Bospel of Mark.

From the Teachers* Edition of the Bevised New Testament, with
Harmony of the Gospels, List of Lessons, Maps, etc. Paper,
15 cents; cloth, 50 cents.

Half-Dime Hymn Book.

Standard Hymns. Wi'h Biographical Notes of their Authors.
Compiled *by Kev. EDWAKD P. THWTNG. 32mo, paper, 96 pp.
Each, 6 cents; in lots of fifty or more, 5 cents.

Hand-Book of Illustrations.

The Preacher's Cabinet. A Hand-Book of Hlnstra*ionw. By Key.
EDWAED P. THWINQ, author of "Drill-Book in Vocal Culture,'*
I "Outdoor Life in Europe," etc. fburth edition. 2 TO!S. 12mo,
paper, 144 pp., 50 cents.

Home Altar.

The Home Altar: An Appeal in Behalf of Family Worship. Witfc
Prayers and Hymns for Family Use. By Ber. CHARLES F.
DEEMS, LL.D., pastor of the Chnrch of the Strangers. Third edition.
12mo, cloth, 281 pp., 75 cents.

*3- The «6o»e teorkt vrill t* *c*t by mail, ptatttye j»a»d. on rteetft of Shtprict,

389

THE STANDARD LIBRARY.

WHAT REPRESENTATIVE CLERGYMEN SAY

OF IT.

Chas. If. Hall, D.D., Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Brooklyn,

says :

" Great book monopolies, like huge railroad syndicates, are now the mo-
narchical relics against which the benevolence and radicalism of the age,
from different standpoints, are bound to wage war. Eacli source will have
its own motives and arguments, but each willresolve to conquer in the long
run. At one end of the scale we have tho Life of Dickens offered for $80u,
that some one wealthy man may enjoy the comfort of liis proud privilege
of wealth in having what no other mortal possesses ; at the other, we find
the volume offered at 10 or 20 cents, which any newsboy or thoughtful
laborer uses in common with thousands. In the great strife for the great-
est good of the largest number, put me down as on the side of the last. 1
enclose my subscription order for a year."

Rev. Chas. W. Cashing, D.D., First M. E. Church, Rochester,

N. Y., says :

" One of the most pernicious sources of evil among our young people
Is the books they re.id. When I can get a young man interested in substan-
tial books, I have great hope of him. For this reason 1 have been deeply
Interested in your effort to make good books as cheap as bad ones. I men-
tioned the matter from my pulpit. As a result I at once got fifty-four sub-
scribers for the full set, and more to come."

J. O. Peck, D.l>., First M. E. Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., says:

" Your effort is commendable. You ought to have the co-operation of
all good men. It is a moral, heroic, and humane enterprise."

Pres. Mark Hopkins, D.D., of Williams College, says :

"The attempt of Messrs. Funk and Wagnalls to place good literature
within reach of the masses is worthy of all commendation and encourage-
ment. If the plan can be successfully carried out, it will be a great boon
to the country."

Ceo. Co Lorrimer, D.D., Baptist Church, Chicago, eays :

" I sincerely hope your endeavors to circulate a wholesome nnd elevat-
ing class of books will prove successful. Certainly, clergymen, and Chris-
tians generally, cannot afford thnt it should fail. 'In proof of my personal
interest in your endeavors, I subscribe for a year."

J. P. Newman, D.D., New York, says :

"I have had faith from the beginning in the mission of Messrs. Funk <fc
Wagnalls. It required great faith on "their part, and their success is in
proof that all things are possible to him that believeth. They have done
for the public what long was needed, but what other publishers did not
venture to do."

Henry J. Van Dyke, D.D., Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.,

says:

" Good books are great blessings. They drive out darkness by letting
In light. Your plan ought, not to fail for lack of support. Put my name
on &• list of subscribers."

240

T» W* Chambers, P.D., Collegiate Reformed Church, New York, saye:
" The plan seems to me both praiseworthy and feasible. I trust it will
meet with speedy and abundant success."

Sylvester F. Scovel, D.D., First Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh,
Pa., says :

" Tour plans deserve a place in the category of moral reforms. The
foes they meet, the width of the battle-ground they can be expanded to
cover, the manifold incidental blessing's they may convey to thousands of
households, the national and international currents of thought they may
set in motion, entitle them beyond all question to prompt and efficient aid
from clergymen and the whole Christian Church.''

Ezra Abbot, D.D., LL.D., of Harvard College, Bays :

"I heartily approve of your project I shall be glad to receive and
commend the volumes to buyers. I send you my subscription."

Thos. Armitage, D.D., Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, New York,

says:

" Your plan is grand and philanthropic. I wish you success, and ask
you to put me down for one set, with the assurance that I will aid you by
every kind word which opportunity suggests."

William M . Taylor, D.D., Broadway Tabernacle, New York, Bays :

41 The success of the plan depends very much on the character of the
books selected ; but if you are wise in that particular, as I have no doubt,
you will be benefactors to many struggling readers in whose experience a
new book is one of the rarest treats. I am glad to see, too, that you are
making arrangements with the English publishers, BO that iu conferring
a boon upon readers here you will not be doing injustice to authors across
the sea."

James Sells, D.D., Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati, 0., says :
" From the reputation of your house I am ready to believe that you will
publish only worthy books. I heartily wish you success."

X*. J. Wolf, D.D., of the Lutheran Seminary, Gettysburg, Pa., says :

" A more laudable project I can hardly concefve of. Vicious literature
has long had the advantage in that it was put within easy reach of the
masses. The poverty of many who fain would use the very best books has
often distressed me. I feel in my heart that the noble enterprise of your
house is deserving of the most liberal encouragement."

Bishop Samuel Fallows, Reformed Episcopalian Church, Chicago,

says :

"Your plan for supplying the masses with the best reading at such a
nominal price cannot be too highly commended."

J. L. Burrows, D.D., Baptist Church, Norfolk, Va., says :

" Every endeavor to supersede poison by food for the people deserves
encouragement"

Rev. W. F. Crafts, Lee Avenue Congregationalist Church, Brooklyn,

says :

"In the West they displace the worthless prairie grass by sowing blue
grass. The soil Is too rich to be inactive. It will have a right or wrong
activity. So about the love of reading in the young. It is prime soil and
will beartiill wire grass if we do not give it blue grass. It will have bad
reading, if the good, equally cheap and attractive, is not provided.

THE STANDARD SERIES.

Best Books for a Trifle.

THESE books are printed in readable type, on fair paper, and are bound in postal
ird manilla.

These books are printed wholly without abridgment, except Canon Farrar's "Life
,urist" and his "Life of Paul.11

No. Price.

1. John Ploughman's Talk. C. H.
Spurgeon. On Choice of Books.
Thomas Carlyle. 4to. Both.... $012

2. Manliness of Christ. Thomas
Hughes. 4to

3, Essays. Lord Macau lay. 4to...

4, Liiihtof Asia. Edwin Arnold. 4to.
". Imitation of Christ. Thomas a

Kempis. 4to

«-7. Life of Christ. Canon Farrar.

4to

Assays. Thomas Carlyle. 4to..
). Life and Work of St. Paul.
Canon Farrar. 4to 2 parts, both
-self-Culture. Prof. J. S. Blackie.

4to. 2 parts, both

*^-19. Pooular History of England.
Chas/ Knight. 4to

J 21. Rubin's Letters to Workmen
and Laborer*. 4to. 2 parts, both
Idyls of the King. Alfred Tenny-
son. 4to

Life of Rowland Hill. Rev. V. J.

Charlesworth. 4to

Town Geology. Charles Kings-
lev. 4to

25. Alfred the Great. Thos. Hughes.
4to

26. Outdoor Life in Europe. Rev. E.
P. Towing. 4to

27. Calamities of Authors. I. D'ls-
raeli. 4to

28. Salon of Madame Necker. Part I.
4to

29. Ethics of the Dust. JohnRuskin.
4to

30-31. Memories of My Exile. Louis
Kpssutli. 4to

32. Mister Horn and His Friends.
Illustrated. 4to

33-34. Orations of Demosthenes. 4to.

•35. Frondes Agrestes. John Rus-

kin. 4to

36. Joan of Arc. Alphonse de La-
martinr. 4to

37. Thoughts of M. Aurelius Anto-
ninus. 4to

33. Salon of Madame Necker. Part
II. 4to

39. The Hermits. Chas. Kingsley. 4r<».

41). John Ploughman's Pictures. C.

H. Spursjeon. 4to

41. Pulpit Table-Talk. Dean Ram-
say. 4to

42. Bible and Newspaper. C. H.
Spurgeon. 4to 15.

43. Lacon. Rev. C. C. Colton. 4to. 20 |

10
15
15

15

50
20

50
10

280

10

No. Price.

44. Goldsmith's Citizen of the World.

4to $0 20

45. America Revisited. George Au-
gustus Sala. 4to 20

46. Life of C. H. Spurgeon. 8vo

John Calvin. M. Guizot.

4to...
Books.

47.

48-49. Dickens' Christmas

Illustrated. 8vo

50. Shairp's Culture and Religion. 8vo.

51-52. Godot's Commentary on Luke.
Ed. by Dr. John Hall. 8vo,2parts,
both

53. Diary of a Minister's Wife. Part

I. 8vo

54-57. Van Doren's Suggestive Com-
mentary on Luke. New edition,
enlarged. 8vo

58. Diary of a Minister's Wife. Part

II. 8vo

59. The Nutritive Cure. Dr. Robert
Walter. 8vo

60. Sartor Resartus. Thomas Car-
lyle. 4to

61-62. Lothair. Lord Beaconsfleld.
8vo

63. The Persian Queen and Other
Pictures of Truth. Rev. E. P.
Thwing. 8vo

64. Salon of Madame Necker. Part

III. 4to

65-66. The Popular History of Eng-
lish Bible Translation. H.P. Co-
nant. 8vo. Price both parts. ..

67. Ingerpoll Answered. Joseph Par-
ker, D.D. 8vo

68-69. Studies in Mark. D. C.
Hughes. 8vo, in iwo parts

70. Job s Comforters. A Religious
Satire. Joseph Parker, D.D. (Lon-
clon.) 12mo

71. The Revi-ers' English. G. Wash-
ington Moon, F7R.S.L. 12mo..

72. The Conversion of Children. Rev.
Edward Payson Hammond. 12m o

73. New Testament Helps. Rev. W.
F. Crafts. 8vo

74. Opium— England's Coercive Poli-
cy. Rev. Jno. Liggins. 8vo

75. Blood of Jesus. Rev. Wm. A.
Reid. With Introduction by E.
P. Hammond. 12mo

76. Lesson in the Closet for 1883.
Charles F. Deems, D D. I2mo. .

77-78. Heroes and Holidays. Rev.

W. F. Crafts. 12mo. 2 pts., both
79. Reminiscences of Rev. Lyman

Keecher, D.D. . 8vo

2 00

15

3 00
15

50

10

10

FUNK & WAGNALLS, 10 and 12 Dey St., NEW YORK.

.A. G-IH.IBA.T? SA.OE/IFIOE.

Young's Analytical Concordance

REDUCED TO $2.50,

IFOIR, -A. XjIIMIIETEID TIIMIIE-

Dr. Young cannot endure to have this, the great work of his life, Judged by the un
authorized editions with which the American market is flooded. These editions, he feels,
do his work and the American public great injustice.

That Americana may be able to see the work a* printed under his eye and from his own
plates, he will sell some thousands of copies at

A Great Pecuniary Sacrifice.

The sale at the reduced prices will begin March 1. 1883, and will continue until The
thousands of copies set apart for this sale are exhausted. 7

recited and unabridged edition— In. every respect the same type, paper, binding, etc., as we
have sold at the higher prices.

It Is a burning shame that the great life-work of one of the most eminent scholars, a
work pronounced in both Europe and America as one of the most laborious and In
that this century has produced, embracing nearly 1100 large quarto pages, each larger and
containing more matter than Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, should prove a gr«at
financial loss to its author !

This great work Is selling in England at $9, and Is now Imported and sold in America

Orders will be filled in tke order received np to the time of the exhaustion
•f the stock

YOUNG'S GREAT CONCORDANCE.

DO WOT BE DECEIVED.

There is bnt one authorised and r-orrect edition of Young's Concordance sold
in America. Evrry copy of thig edition has on the title-page the words
"Authorized Edition," and at the bottom of the" page the imprint

Xsw YORK : FUNK & WAGHALLS. EDINBURGH : GEORGE ADAM YOUNG & COMPANT.

All copies, no matter by whom sold, that have not these words printed on the title-page
*re printed on the bungling plates made by the late American Book Exchange.

Dr. Yorxo says : •• This unauthorized American edition is an outrage on the American
public, and on me, containing grow errors."

Rev. DR. JOHN HALL F

" Dr. Robert Young's Analytical Concordance is worthy of the lifetime of labor he ha?
4pent upon it. I deeply regret that his natural and just expectation of some return from
rts sale on this Bide or the ocean is not realized; and I hope the sense of justice to a
most painstaking author will lead to the choice by many purchasers of the edition which
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