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    Dear Mother, take this English posy, culled.
          In alien fields beyond the severing sea:
    Take it in memory of the boy you lulled
          One chill Canadian winter on your knee.

    Its flowers are but chance friends of after years,
          Whose very names my childhood hardly knew;
    And even today far sweeter in my ears
          Ring older names unheard long seasons through.

    I loved them all--the bloodroot, waxen white,
          Canopied mayflower, trilliums red and pale,
    Flaunting lobelia, lilies richly dight,
          And pipe-plant from the wood behind the Swale.

    I knew each dell where yellow violets blow,
          Each bud or leaf the changing seasons bring;
    I marked each spot where from the melting snow
          Peeped forth the first hepatica of spring.

    I watched the fireflies on the shingly ridge
          Beside the swamp that bounds the Baron's hill;
    Or tempted sunfish by the ebbing bridge,
          Or hooked a bass by Shirley Going's mill.

    These were my budding fancy's mother-tongue:
          But daisies, cowslips, dodder, primrose-hips,
    All beasts or birds my little book has sung,
          Sit like a borrowed speech on stammering lips.

    And still I build fond dreams of happier days,
          If hard-earned pence may bridge the ocean o'er;
    That yet our boy may see my mother's face,
          And gather shells beside Ontario's shore:

    May yet behold Canadian woodlands dim,
          And flowers and birds his father loved to see;
    While you and I sit by and smile on him,
          As down grey years you sat and smiled on me.

    G. A.




_By the same Author._


PHYSIOLOGICAL AESTHETICS: a Scientific Theory of Beauty (London: C.
KEGAN PAUL & CO.)

THE COLOUR-SENSE: its Origin and Development. An Essay on Comparative
Psychology. (London: TRUeBNER & CO.)




THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET




THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE


BY

GRANT ALLEN


London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1881

_All rights reserved_




PREFACE.


These Essays originally appeared in the columns of the 'St. James's
Gazette,' and I have to thank the courtesy of the Editor for kind
permission to republish them. My object in writing them was to make the
general principles and methods of evolutionists a little more familiar
to unscientific readers. Biologists usually deal with those underlying
points of structure which are most really important, and on which all
technical discussion must necessarily be based. But ordinary people
care little for such minute anatomical and physiological details. They
cannot be expected to interest themselves in the _flexor pollicis
longus_, or the _hippocampus major_ about whose very existence
they are ignorant, and whose names suggest to them nothing but
unpleasant ideas. What they want to find out is how the outward and
visible forms of plants and animals were produced. They would much
rather learn why birds have feathers than why they have a keeled
sternum; and they think the origin of bright flowers far more
attractive than the origin of monocotyledonous seeds or exogenous
stems. It is with these surface questions of obvious outward appearance
that I have attempted to deal in this little series. My plan is to take
a simple and well-known natural object, and give such an explanation as
evolutionary principles afford of its most striking external features.
A strawberry, a snail-shell, a tadpole, a bird, a wayside flower--these
are the sort of things which I have tried to explain. If I have not
gone very deep, I hope at least that I have suggested in simple
language the right way to go to work.

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

I have made a few alterations and corrections in some of the papers,
so as to bring the statements into closer accordance with scientific
accuracy. At the same time, I should like to add that I have
intentionally simplified the scientific facts as far as possible. Thus,
instead of saying that the groundsel is a composite, I have said that
it is a daisy by family; and instead of saying that the ascidian larva
belongs to the sub-kingdom Chordata, I have said that it is a first
cousin of the tadpole. For these simplifications, I hope technical
biologists will pardon me. After all, if you wish to be understood, it
is best to speak to people in words whose meanings they know. Definite
and accurate terminology is necessary to express definite and accurate
knowledge; but one may use vague expressions where the definite ones
would convey no ideas.

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

G. A.




CONTENTS.


                                                       PAGE

A BALLADE OF EVOLUTION                                    1

    I. MICROSCOPIC BRAINS                                 3

   II. A WAYSIDE BERRY                                   16

  III. IN SUMMER FIELDS                                  25

   IV. A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT                         36

    V. SLUGS AND SNAILS                                  48

   VI. A STUDY OF BONES                                  59

  VII. BLUE MUD                                          67

 VIII. CUCKOO-PINT                                       77

   IX. BERRIES AND BERRIES                               87

    X. DISTANT RELATIONS                                 96

   XI. AMONG THE HEATHER                                105

  XII. SPECKLED TROUT                                   114

 XIII. DODDER AND BROOMRAPE                             124

  XIV. DOG'S MERCURY AND PLANTAIN                       133

   XV. BUTTERFLY PSYCHOLOGY                             142

  XVI. BUTTERFLY AESTHETICS                              153

 XVII. THE ORIGIN OF WALNUTS                            161

XVIII. A PRETTY LAND-SHELL                              172

  XIX. DOGS AND MASTERS                                 181

   XX. BLACKCOCK                                        189

  XXI. BINDWEED                                         198

 XXII. ON CORNISH CLIFFS                                207




_A BALLADE OF EVOLUTION._


    In the mud of the Cambrian main
      Did our earliest ancestor dive:
    From a shapeless albuminous grain
      We mortals our being derive.
    He could split himself up into five,
      Or roll himself round like a ball;
    For the fittest will always survive,
      While the weakliest go to the wall.

    As an active ascidian again
      Fresh forms he began to contrive,
    Till he grew to a fish with a brain,
      And brought forth a mammal alive.
    With his rivals he next had to strive,
      To woo him a mate and a thrall;
    So the handsomest managed to wive,
      While the ugliest went to the wall.

    At length as an ape he was fain
      The nuts of the forest to rive;
    Till he took to the low-lying plain,
      And proceeded his fellow to knive.
    Thus did cannibal men first arrive,
      One another to swallow and maul;
    And the strongest continued to thrive,
      While the weakliest went to the wall.


    ENVOY.

    Prince, in our civilised hive,
      Now money's the measure of all;
    And the wealthy in coaches can drive,
      While the needier go to the wall.




THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE.




I.

_MICROSCOPIC BRAINS._


Sitting on this little rounded boss of gneiss beside the path which
cuts obliquely through the meadow, I am engaged in watching a brigade
of ants out on foraging duty, and intent on securing for the nest three
whole segments of a deceased earthworm. They look for all the world
like those busy companies one sees in the Egyptian wall-paintings,
dragging home a huge granite colossus by sheer force of bone and sinew.
Every muscle in their tiny bodies is strained to the utmost as they
prise themselves laboriously against the great boulders which strew the
path, and which are known to our Brobdingnagian intelligence as grains
of sand. Besides the workers themselves, a whole battalion of
stragglers runs to and fro upon the broad line which leads to the
head-quarters of the community. The province of these stragglers, who
seem so busy doing nothing, probably consists in keeping communications
open, and encouraging the sturdy pullers by occasional relays of fresh
workmen. I often wish that I could for a while get inside those tiny
brains, and see, or rather smell, the world as ants do. For there can
be little doubt that to these brave little carnivores here the universe
is chiefly known as a collective bundle of odours, simultaneous or
consecutive. As our world is mainly a world of visible objects, theirs,
I believe, is mainly a world of olfactible things.

In the head of every one of these little creatures is something that we
may fairly call a brain. Of course most insects have no real brains;
the nerve-substance in their heads is a mere collection of ill-arranged
ganglia, directly connected with their organs of sense. Whatever man
may be, an earwig at least is a conscious, or rather a semi-conscious,
automaton. He has just a few knots of nerve-cells in his little pate,
each of which leads straight from his dim eye or his vague ear or
his indefinite organs of taste; and his muscles obey the promptings
of external sensations without possibility of hesitation or
consideration, as mechanically as the valve of a steam-engine obeys the
governor-balls. You may say of him truly, 'Nihil est in intellectu quod
non fuerit in sensu;' and you need not even add the Leibnitzian saving
clause, 'nisi ipse intellectus;' for the poor soul's intellect is
wholly deficient, and the senses alone make up all that there is of
him, subjectively considered. But it is not so with the highest
insects. They have something which truly answers to the real brain of
men, apes, and dogs, to the cerebral hemispheres and the cerebellum
which are superadded in us mammals upon the simple sense-centres of
lower creatures. Besides the eye, with its optic nerve and optic
perceptive organs--besides the ear, with its similar mechanism--we
mammalian lords of creation have a higher and more genuine brain, which
collects and compares the information given to the senses, and sends
down the appropriate messages to the muscles accordingly. Now, bees and
flies and ants have got much the same sort of arrangement, on a smaller
scale, within their tiny heads. On top of the little knots which do
duty as nerve-centres for their eyes and mouths, stand two stalked bits
of nervous matter, whose duty is analogous to that of our own brains.
And that is why these three sorts of insects think and reason so much
more intellectually than beetles or butterflies, and why the larger
part of them have organised their domestic arrangements on such an
excellent co-operative plan.

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

What, however, forms the thinkable universe of these little ants
running to and fro so eagerly at my feet? That is a question which used
long to puzzle me in my afternoon walks. The ant has a brain and an
intelligence, but that brain and that intelligence must have been
developed out of _something_. _Ex nihilo nihil fit._ You cannot think
and know if you have nothing to think about. The intelligence of the
bee and the fly was evolved in the course of their flying about and
looking at things: the more they flew, and the more they saw, the more
they knew; and the more brain they got to think with. But the ant does
not generally fly, and, as with most comparatively unlocomotive
animals, its sight is bad. True, the winged males and females have
retained in part the usual sharp eyes of their class--for they are
first cousins to the bees--and they also possess three little eyelets
or _ocelli_, which are wanting to the wingless neuters. Without these
they would never have found one another in their courtship, and they
would have run their heads against the nearest tree, or rushed down the
gaping throat of the first expectant swallow, and so effectually
extinguished their race. Flying animals cannot do without eyes, and
they always possess the most highly developed vision of any living
creatures. But the wingless neuters are almost blind--in some species
quite so; and Sir John Lubbock has shown that their appreciation of
colour is mostly confined to an aversion to red light, and a
comparative endurance of blue. Moreover, they are apparently deaf, and
most of their other senses seem little developed. What can be the raw
material on which that pin's head of a brain sets itself working? For,
small as it is, it is a wonderful organ of intellect; and though Sir
John Lubbock has shown us all too decisively that the originality and
inventive genius of ants have been sadly overrated by Solomon and
others, yet Darwin is probably right none the less in saying that no
more marvellous atom of matter exists in the universe than this same
wee lump of microscopic nerve substance.

My dog Grip, running about on the path there, with his nose to the
ground, and sniffing at every stick and stone he meets on his way,
gives us the clue to solve the problem. Grip, as Professor Croom
Robertson suggests, seems capable of extracting a separate and
distinguishable smell from everything. I have only to shy a stone on
the beach among a thousand other stones, and my dog, like a well-bred
retriever as he is, selects and brings back to me that individual stone
from all the stones around, by exercise of his nose alone. It is plain
that Grip's world is not merely a world of sights, but a world of
smells as well. He not only smells smells, but he remembers smells, he
thinks smells, he even dreams smells, as you may see by his sniffing
and growling in his sleep. Now, if I were to cut open Grip's head
(which heaven forfend), I should find in it a correspondingly big
smell-nerve and smell-centre--an olfactory lobe, as the anatomists say.
All the accumulated nasal experiences of his ancestors have made that
lobe enormously developed. But in a man's head you would find a very
large and fine optic centre, and only a mere shrivelled relic to
represent the olfactory lobes. You and I and our ancestors have had but
little occasion for sniffing and scenting; our sight and our touch have
done duty as chief intelligencers from the outer world; and the nerves
of smell, with their connected centres, have withered away to the
degenerate condition in which they now are. Consequently, smell plays
but a small part in our thought and our memories. The world that we
know is chiefly a world of sights and touches. But in the brain of dog,
or deer, or antelope, smell is a prevailing faculty; it colours all
their ideas, and it has innumerable nervous connections with every part
of their brain. The big olfactory lobes are in direct communication
with a thousand other nerves; odours rouse trains of thought or
powerful emotions in their minds just as visible objects do in our own.

Now, in the dog or the horse sight and smell are equally developed; so
that they probably think of most things about equally in terms of each.
In ourselves, sight is highly developed, and smell is a mere relic; so
that we think of most things in terms of sight alone, and only rarely,
as with a rose or a lily, in terms of both. But in ants, on the
contrary, smell is highly developed and sight a mere relic; so that
they probably think of most things as smellable only, and very little
as visible in form or colour. Dr. Bastian has shown that bees and
butterflies are largely guided by scent; and though he is certainly
wrong in supposing that sight has little to do with leading them to
flowers (for if you cut off the bright- corolla they will never
discover the mutilated blossoms, even when they visit others on the
same plant), yet the mere fact that so many flowers are scented is by
itself enough to show that perfume has a great deal to do with the
matter. In wingless ants, while the eyes have undergone degeneration,
this high sense of smell has been continued and further developed, till
it has become their principal sense-endowment, and the chief raw
material of their intelligence. Their active little brains are almost
wholly engaged in correlating and co-ordinating smells with actions.
Their olfactory nerves give them nearly all the information they can
gain about the external world, and their brains take in this
information and work out the proper movements which it indicates. By
smell they find their way about and carry on the business of their
lives. Just as you and I know the road from Regent's Circus to Pall
Mall by visible signs of the street-corners and the Duke of York's
Column, so these little ants know the way from the nest to the corpse
of the dismembered worm by observing and remembering the smells which
they met with on their way. See: I obliterate the track for an inch or
two with my stick, and the little creatures go beside themselves with
astonishment and dismay. They rush about wildly, inquiring of one
another with their antennae whether this is really Doomsday, and whether
the whole course of nature has been suddenly revolutionised. Then,
after a short consultation, they determine upon action; and every ant
starts off in a different direction to hunt the lost track, head to the
ground, exactly as a pointer hunts the missing trail of a bird or hare.
Each ventures an inch or so off, and then runs back to find the rest,
for fear he should get isolated altogether. At last, after many
failures, one lucky fellow hits upon the well-remembered train of
scents, and rushes back leaving smell-tracks no doubt upon the soil
behind him. The message goes quickly round from post to post, each
sentry making passes with his antennae to the next picket, and so
sending on the news to the main body in the rear. Within five minutes
communications are re-established, and the precious bit of worm-meat
continues triumphantly on its way along the recovered path. An
ingenious writer would even have us believe that ants possess a
scent-language of their own, and emit various odours from their antennae
which the other ants perceive with theirs, and recognise as distinct in
meaning. Be this as it may, you cannot doubt, if you watch them long,
that scents and scents alone form the chief means by which they
recollect and know one another, or the external objects with which they
come in contact. The whole universe is clearly to them a complicated
picture made up entirely of infinite interfusing smells.




II.

_A WAYSIDE BERRY._


Half-hidden in the luxuriant growth of leaves and flowers that drape
the deep side of this green lane, I have just espied a little picture
in miniature, a tall wild strawberry-stalk with three full red berries
standing out on its graceful branchlets. There are glossy
hart's-tongues on the matted bank, and yellow hawkweeds, and bright
bunches of red campion; but somehow, amid all that wealth of shape and
colour, my eye falls and rests instinctively upon the three little
ruddy berries, and upon nothing else. I pick the single stalk from the
bank and hold it here in my hands. The origin and development of these
pretty bits of red pulp is one of the many curious questions upon which
modern theories of life have cast such a sudden and unexpected flood of
light. What makes the strawberry stalk grow out into this odd and
brightly  lump, bearing its small fruits embedded on its
swollen surface? Clearly the agency of those same small birds who have
been mainly instrumental in dressing the haw in its scarlet coat, and
clothing the spindle-berries with their two-fold covering of crimson
doublet and orange cloak.

In common language we speak of each single strawberry as a fruit. But
it is in reality a collection of separate fruits, the tiny yellow-brown
grains which stud its sides being each of them an individual little
nut; while the sweet pulp is, in fact, no part of the true fruit at
all, but merely a swollen stalk. There is a white potentilla so like a
strawberry blossom that even a botanist must look closely at the plant
before he can be sure of its identity. While they are in flower the two
heads remain almost indistinguishable; but when the seed begins to set
the potentilla develops only a collection of dry fruitlets, seated upon
a green receptacle, the bed or soft expansion which hangs on to the
'hull' or calyx. Each fruitlet consists of a thin covering, enclosing a
solitary seed. You may compare one of them separately to a plum, with
its single kernel, only that in the plum the covering is thick and
juicy, while in the potentilla and the fruitlets of the strawberry it
is thin and dry. An almond comes still nearer to the mark. Now the
potentilla shows us, as it were, the primitive form of the strawberry.
But in the developed ripe strawberry as we now find it the fruitlets
are not crowded upon a green receptacle. After flowering, the
strawberry receptacle lengthens and broadens, so as to form a roundish
mass of succulent pulp; and as the fruitlets approach maturity this
sour green pulp becomes soft, sweet, and red. The little seed-like
fruits, which are the important organs, stand out upon its surface like
mere specks; while the comparatively unimportant receptacle is all that
we usually think of when we talk about strawberries. After our usual
Protagorean fashion we regard man as the measure of all things, and pay
little heed to any part of the compound fruit-cluster save that which
ministers directly to our own tastes.

But why does the strawberry develop this large mass of apparently
useless matter? Simply in order the better to ensure the dispersion of
its small brown fruitlets. Birds are always hunting for seeds and
insects along the hedge-rows, and devouring such among them as contain
any available foodstuff. In most cases they crush the seeds to pieces
with their gizzards, and digest and assimilate their contents. Seeds of
this class are generally enclosed in green or brown capsules, which
often escape the notice of the birds, and so succeed in perpetuating
their species. But there is another class of plants whose members
possess hard and indigestible seeds, and so turn the greedy birds from
dangerous enemies into useful allies. Supposing there was by chance,
ages ago, one of these primitive ancestral strawberries, whose
receptacle was a little more pulpy than usual, and contained a small
quantity of sugary matter, such as is often found in various parts of
plants; then it might happen to attract the attention of some hungry
bird, which, by eating the soft pulp, would help in dispersing the
indigestible fruitlets. As these fruitlets sprang up into healthy young
plants, they would tend to reproduce the peculiarity in the structure
of the receptacle which marked the parent stock, and some of them would
probably display it in a more marked degree. These would be sure to get
eaten in their turn, and so to become the originators of a still more
pronounced strawberry type. As time went on, the largest and sweetest
berries would constantly be chosen by the birds, till the whole species
began to assume its existing character. The receptacle would become
softer and sweeter, and the fruits themselves harder and more
indigestible: because, on the one hand, all sour or hard berries would
stand a poorer chance of getting dispersed in good situations for their
growth, while, on the other hand, all soft-shelled fruitlets would be
ground up and digested by the bird, and thus effectually prevented from
ever growing into future plants. Just in like manner, many tropical
nuts have extravagantly hard shells, as only those survive which can
successfully defy the teeth and hands of the clever and persistent
monkey.

This accounts for the strawberry being sweet and pulpy, but not for its
being red. Here, however, a similar reason comes into play. All
ripening fruits and opening flowers have a natural tendency to grow
bright red, or purple, or blue, though in many of them the tendency is
repressed by the dangers attending brilliant displays of colour. This
natural habit depends upon the oxidation of their tissues, and is
exactly analogous to the assumption of autumn tints by leaves. If a
plant, or part of a plant, is injured by such a change of colour,
through being rendered more conspicuous to its foes, it soon loses the
tendency under the influence of natural selection; in other words,
those individuals which most display it get killed out, while those
which least display it survive and thrive. On the other hand, if
conspicuousness is an advantage to the plant, the exact opposite
happens, and the tendency becomes developed into a confirmed habit.
This is the case with the strawberry, as with many other fruits. The
more bright- the berry is, the better its chance of getting its
fruitlets dispersed. Birds have quick eyes for colour, especially for
red and white; and therefore almost all edible berries have assumed one
or other of these two hues. So long as the fruitlets remain unripe, and
would therefore be injured by being eaten, the pulp remains sour,
green, and hard; but as soon as they have become fit for dispersion it
grows soft, fills with sugary juice, and acquires its ruddy outer
flesh. Then the birds see and recognise it as edible, and govern
themselves accordingly.

But if this is the genesis of the strawberry, asks somebody, why have
not all the potentillas and the whole strawberry tribe also become
berries of the same type? Why are there still potentilla fruit-clusters
which consist of groups of dry seed-like nuts? Ay, there's the rub.
Science cannot answer as yet. After all, these questions are still in
their infancy, and we can scarcely yet do more than discover a single
stray interpretation here and there. In the present case a botanist can
only suggest either that the potentilla finds its own mode of
dispersion equally well adapted to its own peculiar circumstances, or
else that the lucky accident, the casual combination of circumstances,
which produced the first elongation of the receptacle in the strawberry
has never happened to befall its more modest kinsfolk. For on such
occasional freaks of nature the whole evolution of new varieties
entirely depends. A gardener may raise a thousand seedlings, and only
one or none among them may present a single new and important feature.
So a species may wait for a thousand years, or for ever, before its
circumstances happen to produce the first step towards some desirable
improvement. One extra petal may be invaluable to a five-rayed flower
as effecting some immense saving of pollen in its fertilisation; and
yet the 'sport' which shall give it this sixth ray may never occur, or
may be trodden down in the mire and destroyed by a passing cow.




III.

_IN SUMMER FIELDS._


Grip and I have come out for a morning stroll among the close-cropped
pastures beside the beck, in the very centre of our green little
dingle. Here I can sit, as is my wont, on a dry knoll, and watch the
birds, beasts, insects, and herbs of the field, while Grip scours the
place in every direction, intent, no doubt, upon those more practical
objects--mostly rats, I fancy--which possess a congenial interest for
the canine intelligence. From my coign of vantage on the knoll I can
take care that he inflicts no grievous bodily injury upon the sheep,
and that he receives none from the quick-tempered cow with the
brass-knobbed horns. For a kind of ancestral feud seems to smoulder for
ever between Grip and the whole race of kine, breaking out every now
and then into open warfare, which calls for my prompt interference, in
an attitude of armed but benevolent neutrality, merely for the friendly
purpose of keeping the peace.

This ancient feud, I imagine, is really ancestral, and dates many ages
further back in time than Grip's individual experiences. Cows hate dogs
instinctively, from their earliest calfhood upward. I used to doubt
once upon a time whether the hatred was not of artificial origin and
wholly induced by the inveterate human habit of egging on every dog to
worry every other animal that comes in its way. But I tried a mild
experiment one day by putting a half-grown town-bred puppy into a small
enclosure with some hitherto unworried calves, and they all turned to
make a common headway against the intruder with the same striking
unanimity as the most ancient and experienced cows. Hence I am inclined
to suspect that the antipathy does actually result from a vaguely
inherited instinct derived from the days when the ancestor of our kine
was a wild bull, and the ancestor of our dogs a wolf, on the wide
forest-clad plains of Central Europe. When a cow puts up its tail at
sight of a dog entering its paddock at the present day, it has probably
some dim instinctive consciousness that it stands in the presence of a
dangerous hereditary foe; and as the wolves could only seize with
safety a single isolated wild bull, so the cows now usually make common
cause against the intruding dog, turning their heads in one direction
with very unwonted unanimity, till his tail finally disappears under
the opposite gate. Such inherited antipathies seem common and natural
enough. Every species knows and dreads the ordinary enemies of its
race. Mice scamper away from the very smell of a cat. Young chickens
run to the shelter of their mother's wings when the shadow of a hawk
passes over their heads. Mr. Darwin put a small snake into a paper bag,
which he gave to the monkeys at the Zoo; and one monkey after another
opened the bag, looked in upon the deadly foe of the quadrumanous kind,
and promptly dropped the whole package with every gesture of horror and
dismay. Even man himself--though his instincts have all weakened so
greatly with the growth of his more plastic intelligence, adapted to a
wider and more modifiable set of external circumstances--seems to
retain a vague and original terror of the serpentine form.

If we think of parallel cases, it is not curious that animals should
thus instinctively recognise their natural enemies. We are not
surprised that they recognise their own fellows: and yet they must do
so by means of some equally strange automatic and inherited mechanism
in their nervous system. One butterfly can tell its mates at once from
a thousand other species, though it may differ from some of them only
by a single spot or line, which would escape the notice of all but the
most attentive observers. Must we not conclude that there are elements
in the butterfly's feeble brain exactly answering to the blank picture
of its specific type? So, too, must we not suppose that in every race
of animals there arises a perceptive structure specially adapted to the
recognition of its own kind? Babies notice human faces long before they
notice any other living thing. In like manner we know that most
creatures can judge instinctively of their proper food. One young bird
just fledged naturally pecks at red berries; another exhibits an
untaught desire to chase down grasshoppers; a third, which happens to
be born an owl, turns at once to the congenial pursuit of small
sparrows, mice, and frogs. Each species seems to have certain faculties
so arranged that the sight of certain external objects, frequently
connected with food in their ancestral experience, immediately arouses
in them the appropriate actions for its capture. Mr. Douglas Spalding
found that newly-hatched chickens darted rapidly and accurately at
flies on the wing. When we recollect that even so late an acquisition
as articulate speech in human beings has its special physical seat in
the brain, it is not astonishing that complicated mechanisms should
have arisen among animals for the due perception of mates, food, and
foes respectively. Thus, doubtless, the serpent form has imprinted
itself indelibly on the senses of monkeys, and the wolf or dog form on
those of cows: so that even with a young ape or calf the sight of these
their ancestral enemies at once calls up uneasy or terrified feelings
in their half-developed minds. Our own infants in arms have no personal
experience of the real meaning to be attached to angry tones, yet they
shrink from the sound of a gruff voice even before they have learned to
distinguish their nurse's face.

When Grip gets among the sheep, their hereditary traits come out in a
very different manner. They are by nature and descent timid mountain
animals, and they have never been accustomed to face a foe, as cows and
buffaloes are wont to do, especially when in a herd together. You
cannot see many traces of the original mountain life among sheep, and
yet there are still a few remaining to mark their real pedigree. Mr.
Herbert Spencer has noticed the fondness of lambs for frisking on a
hillock, however small; and when I come to my little knoll here, I
generally find it occupied by a couple, who rush away on my approach,
but take their stand instead on the merest ant-hill which they can find
in the field. I once knew three young goats, kids of a mountain breed,
and the only elevated object in the paddock where they were kept was a
single old elm stump. For the possession of this stump the goats fought
incessantly; and the victor would proudly perch himself on the top,
with all four legs inclined inward (for the whole diameter of the tree
was but some fifteen inches), maintaining himself in his place with the
greatest difficulty, and butting at his two brothers until at last he
lost his balance and fell. This one old stump was the sole
representative in their limited experience of the rocky pinnacle upon
which their forefathers kept watch like sentinels; and their
instinctive yearnings prompted them to perch themselves upon the only
available memento of their native haunts. Thus, too, but in a dimmer
and vaguer way, the sheep, especially during his younger days, loves to
revert, so far as his small opportunities permit him, to the
unconsciously remembered habits of his race. But in mountain countries,
every one must have noticed how the sheep at once becomes a different
being. On the Welsh hills he casts away all the dull and heavy serenity
of his brethren on the South Downs, and displays once more the freedom,
and even the comparative boldness, of a mountain breed. A
Merionethshire ewe thinks nothing of running up one side of a
low-roofed barn and down the other, or of clearing a stone wall which a
Leicestershire farmer would consider extravagantly high.

Another mountain trait in the stereotyped character of sheep is their
well-known sequaciousness. When Grip runs after them they all run away
together: if one goes through a certain gap in the hedge, every other
follows; and if the leader jumps the beck at a certain spot, every lamb
in the flock jumps in the self-same place. It is said that if you hold
a stick for the first sheep to leap over, and then withdraw it, all the
succeeding sheep will leap with mathematical accuracy at the
corresponding point; and this habit is usually held up to ridicule as
proving the utter stupidity of the whole race. It really proves nothing
but the goodness of their ancestral instincts. For mountain animals,
accustomed to follow a leader, that leader being the bravest and
strongest ram of the flock, must necessarily follow him with the most
implicit obedience. He alone can see what obstacles come in the way;
and each of the succeeding train must watch and imitate the actions of
their predecessors. Otherwise, if the flock happens to come to a chasm,
running as they often must with some speed, any individual which
stopped to look and decide for itself before leaping would inevitably
be pushed over the edge by those behind it, and so would lose all
chance of handing down its cautious and sceptical spirit to any
possible descendants. On the other hand, those uninquiring and blindly
obedient animals which simply did as they saw others do would both
survive themselves and become the parents of future and similar
generations. Thus there would be handed down from dam to lamb a general
tendency to sequaciousness--a follow-my-leader spirit, which was really
the best safeguard for the race against the evils of insubordination,
still so fatal to Alpine climbers. And now that our sheep have settled
down to a tame and monotonous existence on the downs of Sussex or the
levels of the Midlands, the old instinct clings to them still, and
speaks out plainly for their mountain origin. There are few things in
nature more interesting to notice than these constant survivals of
instinctive habits in altered circumstances. They are to the mental
life what rudimentary organs are to the bodily structure: they remind
us of an older order of things, just as the abortive legs of the
blind-worm show us that he was once a lizard, and the hidden shell of
the slug that he was once a snail.




IV.

_A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT._


The little streamlet whose tiny ranges and stickles form the middle
thread of this green combe in the Dorset downs is just at present
richly clad with varied foliage. Tall spikes of the yellow flag rise
above the slow-flowing pools, while purple loose-strife overhangs the
bank, and bunches of the arrowhead stand high out of their watery home,
just unfolding their pretty waxen white flowers to the air. In the
rapids, on the other hand, I find the curious water crowfoot, a spray
of which I have this moment pulled out of the stream and am now holding
in my hand as I sit on the little stone bridge, with my legs dangling
over the pool below, known to me as the undoubted residence of a pair
of trout. It is a queer plant, this crowfoot, with its two distinct
types of leaves, much cleft below and broad above; and I often wonder
why so strange a phenomenon has attracted such very scant attention.
But then we knew so little of life in any form till the day before
yesterday that perhaps it is not surprising we should still have left
so many odd problems quite untouched.

This problem of the shape of leaves certainly seems to me a most
important one; and yet it has hardly been even recognised by our
scientific pastors and masters. At best, Mr. Herbert Spencer devotes to
it a passing short chapter, or Mr. Darwin a stray sentence. The
practice of classifying plants mainly by means of their flowers has
given the flower a wholly factitious and overwrought importance.
Besides, flowers are so pretty, and we cultivate them so largely, with
little regard to the leaves, that they have come to usurp almost the
entire interest of botanists and horticulturists alike. Darwinism
itself has only heightened this exclusive interest by calling attention
to the reciprocal relations which exist between the honey-bearing
blossom and the fertilising insect, the bright- petals and the
myriad facets of the butterfly's eye. Yet the leaf is after all the
real plant, and the flower is but a sort of afterthought, an embryo
colony set apart for the propagation of like plants in future. Each
leaf is in truth a separate individual organism, united with many
others into a compound community, but possessing in full its own mouths
and digestive organs, and carrying on its own life to a great extent
independently of the rest. It may die without detriment to them; it may
be lopped off with a few others as a cutting, and it continues its
life-cycle quite unconcerned. An oak tree in full foliage is a
magnificent group of such separate individuals--a whole nation in
miniature: it may be compared to a branched coral polypedom covered
with a thousand little insect workers, while each leaf answers rather
to the separate polypes themselves. The leaves are even capable of
producing new individuals by what they contribute to the buds on every
branch; and the seeds which the tree as a whole produces are to be
looked upon rather as the founders of fresh colonies, like the swarms
of bees, than as fresh individuals alone. Every plant community, in
short, both adds new members to its own commonwealth, and sends off
totally distinct germs to form new commonwealths elsewhere. Thus the
leaf is, in truth, the central reality of the whole plant, while the
flower exists only for the sake of sending out a shipload of young
emigrants every now and then to try their fortunes in some unknown
soil.

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

Plants which live habitually under water almost always have thin, long,
pointed leaves, often thread-like or mere waving filaments. The reason
for this is plain enough. Gases are not very abundant in water, as it
only holds in solution a limited quantity of oxygen and carbonic acid.
Both of these the plant needs, though in varying quantities: the carbon
to build up its starch, and the oxygen to use up in its growth.
Accordingly, broad and large leaves would starve under water: there is
not material enough diffused through it for them to make a living from.
But small, long, waving leaves which can move up and down in the stream
would manage to catch almost every passing particle of gaseous matter,
and to utilise it under the influence of sunlight. Hence all plants
which live in fresh water, and especially all plants of higher rank,
have necessarily acquired such a type of leaf. It is the only form in
which growth can possibly take place under their circumstances. Of
course, however, the particular pattern of leaf depends largely upon
the ancestral form. Thus this crowfoot, even in its submerged leaves,
preserves the general arrangement of ribs and leaflets common to the
whole buttercup tribe. For the crowfoot family is a large and eminently
adaptable race. Some of them are larkspurs and similar queerly-shaped
blossoms; others are columbines which hang their complicated bells on
dry and rocky hillsides; but the larger part are buttercups or marsh
marigolds which have simple cup-shaped flowers, and mostly frequent low
and marshy ground. One of these typical crowfoots under stress of
circumstances--inundation, or the like--took once upon a time to living
pretty permanently in the water. As its native meadows grew deeper and
deeper in flood it managed from year to year to assume a more nautical
life. So, while its leaf necessarily remained in general structure a
true crowfoot leaf, it was naturally compelled to split itself up into
thinner and narrower segments, each of which grew out in the direction
where it could find most stray carbon atoms, and most sunlight, without
interference from its neighbours. This, I take it, was the origin of
the much-divided lower leaves.

But a crowfoot could never live permanently under water. Seaweeds and
their like, which propagate by a kind of spores, may remain below the
surface for ever; but flowering plants for the most part must come up
to the open air to blossom. The sea-weeds are in the same position as
fish, originally developed in the water and wholly adapted to it,
whereas flowering plants are rather analogous to seals and whales,
air-breathing creatures, whose ancestors lived on land, and who can
themselves manage an aquatic existence only by frequent visits to the
surface. So some flowering water-plants actually detach their male
blossoms altogether, and let them float loose on the top of the water;
while they send up their female flowers by means of a spiral coil, and
draw them down again as soon as the wind or the fertilising insects
have carried the pollen to its proper receptacle, so as to ripen their
seeds at leisure beneath the pond. Similarly, you may see the arrowhead
and the water-lilies sending up their buds to open freely in the air,
or loll at ease upon the surface of the stream. Thus the crowfoot, too,
cannot blossom to any purpose below the water; and as such among its
ancestors as at first tried to do so must of course have failed in
producing any seed, they and their kind have died out for ever; while
only those lucky individuals whose chance lot it was to grow a little
taller and weedier than the rest, and so overtop the stream, have
handed down their race to our own time.

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

But above water, as below it, the crowfoot remains in principle a
crowfoot still. The traditions of its race, acquired in damp marshy
meadows, not actually under water, cling to it yet in spite of every
change. Born river and pond plants which rise to the surface, like the
water-lily or the duck-weed, have broad floating leaves that contrast
strongly with the waving filaments of wholly submerged species. They
can find plenty of food everywhere, and as the sunlight falls flat upon
them, they may as well spread out flat to catch the sunlight. No other
elbowing plants overtop them and appropriate the rays, so compelling
them to run up a useless waste of stem in order to pocket their fair
share of the golden flood. Moreover, they thus save the needless
expense of a stout leaf-stalk, as the water supports their lolling
leaves and blossoms; while the broad shade which they cast on the
bottom below prevents the undue competition of other species. But the
crowfoot, being by descent a kind of buttercup, has taken to the water
for a few hundred generations only, while the water-lily's ancestors
have been to the manner born for millions of years; and therefore it
happens that the crowfoot is at heart but a meadow buttercup still. One
glance at its simple little flower will show you that in a moment.




V.

_SLUGS AND SNAILS._


Hoeing among the flower-beds on my lawn this morning--for I am a bit of
a gardener in my way--I have had the ill-luck to maim a poor yellow
slug, who had hidden himself among the encroaching grass on the edge of
my little parterre of sky-blue lobelias. This unavoidable wounding and
hacking of worms and insects, despite all one's care, is no small
drawback to the pleasures of gardening _in propria persona_.
Vivisection for genuine scientific purposes in responsible hands, one
can understand and tolerate, even though lacking the heart for it
oneself; but the useless and causeless vivisection which cannot be
prevented in every ordinary piece of farm-work seems a gratuitous blot
upon the face of beneficent nature. My only consolation lies in the
half-formed belief that feeling among these lower creatures is
indefinite, and that pain appears to affect them far less acutely than
it affects warm-blooded animals. Their nerves are so rudely distributed
in loose knots all over the body, instead of being closely bound
together into a single central system as with ourselves, that they can
scarcely possess a consciousness of pain at all analogous to our own. A
wasp whose head has been severed from its body and stuck upon a pin,
will still greedily suck up honey with its throatless mouth; while an
Italian mantis, similarly treated, will calmly continue to hunt and
dart at midges with its decapitated trunk and limbs, quite forgetful of
the fact that it has got no mandibles left to eat them with. These
peculiarities lead one to hope that insects may feel pain less than we
fear. Yet I dare scarcely utter the hope, lest it should lead any
thoughtless hearer to act upon the very questionable belief, as they
say even the amiable enthusiasts of Port Royal acted upon the doctrine
that animals were mere unconscious automata, by pushing their theory to
the too practical length of active cruelty. Let us at least give the
slugs and beetles the benefit of the doubt. People often say that
science makes men unfeeling: for my own part, I fancy it makes them
only the more humane, since they are the better able dimly to figure to
themselves the pleasures and pains of humbler beings as they really
are. The man of science perhaps realises more vividly than all other
men the inner life and vague rights even of crawling worms and ugly
earwigs.

I will take up this poor slug whose mishap has set me preaching, and
put him out of his misery at once, if misery it be. My hoe has cut
through the soft flesh of the mantle and hit against the little
embedded shell. Very few people know that a slug has a shell, but it
has, though quite hidden from view; at least, in this yellow kind--for
there are other sorts which have got rid of it altogether. I am not
sure that I have wounded the poor thing very seriously; for the shell
protects the heart and vital organs, and the hoe has glanced off on
striking it, so that the mantle alone is injured, and that by no means
irrecoverably. Snail flesh heals fast, and on the whole I shall be
justified, I think, in letting him go. But it is a very curious thing
that this slug should have a shell at all! Of course it is by descent a
snail, and, indeed, there are very few differences between the two
races except in the presence or absence of a house. You may trace a
curiously complete set of gradations between the perfect snail and the
perfect slug in this respect; for all the intermediate forms still
survive with only an almost imperceptible gap between each species and
the next. Some kinds, like the common brown garden snail, have
comparatively small bodies and big shells, so that they can retire
comfortably within them when attacked; and if they only had a lid or
door to their houses they could shut themselves up hermetically, as
periwinkles and similar mollusks actually do. Other kinds, like the
pretty golden amber-snails which frequent marshy places, have a body
much too big for its house, so that they cannot possibly retire within
their shells completely. Then come a number of intermediate species,
each with progressively smaller and thinner shells, till at length we
reach the testacella, which has only a sort of limpet-shaped shield on
his tail, so that he is generally recognised as being the first of the
slugs rather than the last of the snails. You will not find a
testacella unless you particularly look for him, for he seldom comes
above ground, being a most bloodthirsty subterraneous carnivore who
follows the burrows of earthworms as savagely as a ferret tracks those
of rabbits; but in all the southern and western counties you may light
upon stray specimens if you search carefully in damp places under
fallen leaves. Even in testacella, however, the small shell is still
external. In this yellow slug here, on the contrary, it does not show
itself at all, but is buried under the closely wrinkled skin of the
glossy mantle. It has become a mere saucer, with no more symmetry or
regularity than an oyster-shell. Among the various kinds of slugs, you
may watch this relic or rudiment gradually dwindling further and
further towards annihilation; till finally, in the great fat black
slugs which appear so plentifully on the roads after summer showers, it
is represented only by a few rough calcareous grains, scattered up and
down through the mantle; and sometimes even these are wanting. The
organs which used to secrete the shell in their remote ancestors have
either ceased to work altogether or are reduced to performing a useless
office by mere organic routine.

The reason why some mollusks have thus lost their shells is clear
enough. Shells are of two kinds, calcareous and horny. Both of them
require more or less lime or other mineral matters, though in varying
proportions. Now, the snails which thrive best on the bare chalk downs
behind my little combe belong to that pretty banded black-and-white
sort which everybody must have noticed feeding in abundance on all
chalk soils. Indeed, Sussex farmers will tell you that South Down
mutton owes its excellence to these fat little mollusks, not to the
scanty herbage of their thin pasture-lands. The pretty banded shells in
question are almost wholly composed of lime, which the snails can, of
course, obtain in any required quantity from the chalk. In most
limestone districts you will similarly find that snails with calcareous
shells predominate. But if you go into a granite or sandstone tract you
will see that horny shells have it all their own way. Now, some snails
with such houses took to living in very damp and marshy places, which
they were naturally apt to do--as indeed the land-snails in a body are
merely pond-snails which have taken to crawling up the leaves of
marsh-plants, and have thus gradually acclimatised themselves to a
terrestrial existence. We can trace a perfectly regular series from the
most aquatic to the most land-loving species, just as I have tried to
trace a regular series from the shell-bearing snails to the shell-less
slugs. Well, when the earliest common ancestor of both these last-named
races first took to living above water, he possessed a horny shell
(like that of the amber-snail), which his progenitors used to
manufacture from the mineral matters dissolved in their native streams.
Some of the younger branches descended from this primaeval land-snail
took to living on very dry land, and when they reached chalky districts
manufactured their shells, on an easy and improved principle, almost
entirely out of lime. But others took to living in moist and boggy
places, where mineral matter was rare, and where the soil consisted for
the most part of decaying vegetable mould. Here they could get little
or no lime, and so their shells grew smaller and smaller, in proportion
as their habits became more decidedly terrestrial. But to the last, as
long as any shell at all remained, it generally covered their hearts
and other important organs; because it would there act as a special
protection, even after it had ceased to be of any use for the defence
of the animal's body as a whole. Exactly in the same way men specially
protected their heads and breasts with helmets and cuirasses, before
armour was used for the whole body, because these were the places where
a wound would be most dangerous; and they continued to cover these
vulnerable spots in the same manner even when the use of armour had
been generally abandoned. My poor mutilated slug, who is just now
crawling off contentedly enough towards the hedge, would have been cut
in two outright by my hoe had it not been for that solid calcareous
plate of his, which saved his life as surely as any coat of mail.

How does it come, though, that slugs and snails now live together in
the self-same districts? Why, because they each live in their own way.
Slugs belong by origin to very damp and marshy spots; but in the fierce
competition of modern life they spread themselves over comparatively
dry places, provided there is long grass to hide in, or stones under
which to creep, or juicy herbs like lettuce, among whose leaves are
nice moist nooks wherein to lurk during the heat of the day. Moreover,
some kinds of slugs are quite as well protected from birds (such as
ducks) by their nauseous taste as snails are by their shells. Thus it
happens that at present both races may be discovered in many hedges and
thickets side by side. But the real home of each is quite different.
The truest and most snail-like snails are found in greatest abundance
upon high chalk-downs, heathy limestone hills, and other comparatively
dry places; while the truest and most slug-like slugs are found in
greatest abundance among low water-logged meadows, or under the damp
fallen leaves of moist copses. The intermediate kinds inhabit the
intermediate places. Yet to the last even the most thorough-going
snails retain a final trace of their original water-haunting life, in
their universal habit of seeking out the coolest and moistest spots of
their respective habitats. The soft-fleshed mollusks are all by nature
aquatic animals, and nothing can induce them wholly to forget the old
tradition of their marine or fresh-water existence.




VI.

_A STUDY OF BONES._


On the top of this bleak chalk down, where I am wandering on a dull
afternoon, I light upon the blanched skeleton of a crow, which I need
not fear to handle, as its bones have been first picked clean by
carrion birds, and then finally purified by hungry ants, time, and
stormy weather. I pick a piece of it up in my hands, and find that I
have got hold of its clumped tail-bone. A strange fragment truly, with
a strange history, which I may well spell out as I sit to rest a minute
upon the neighbouring stile. For this dry tail-bone consists, as I can
see at a glance, of several separate vertebrae, all firmly welded
together into a single piece. They must once upon a time have been real
disconnected jointed vertebrae, like those of the dog's or lizard's
tail; and the way in which they have become fixed fast into a solid
mass sheds a world of light upon the true nature and origin of birds,
as well as upon many analogous cases elsewhere.

When I say that these bones were once separate, I am indulging in no
mere hypothetical Darwinian speculation. I refer, not to the race, but
to the particular crow in person. These very pieces themselves, in
their embryonic condition, were as distinct as the individual bones of
the bird's neck or of our own spines. If you were to examine the chick
in the egg you would find them quite divided. But as the young crow
grows more and more into the typical bird-pattern, this lizard-like
peculiarity fades away, and the separate pieces unite by 'anastomosis'
into a single 'coccygean bone,' as the osteologists call it. In all our
modern birds, as in this crow, the vertebrae composing the tail-bone are
few in number, and are soldered together immovably in the adult form.
It was not always so, however, with ancestral birds. The earliest known
member of the class--the famous fossil bird of the Solenhofen
lithographic stone--retained throughout its whole life a long flexible
tail, composed of twenty unwelded vertebrae, each of which bore a single
pair of quill-feathers, the predecessors of our modern pigeon's train.
There are many other marked reptilian peculiarities in this primitive
oolitic bird; and it apparently possessed true teeth in its jaws, as
its later cretaceous kinsmen discovered by Professor Marsh undoubtedly
did. When we compare side by side those real flying dragons, the
Pterodactyls, together with the very birdlike Deinosaurians, on the one
hand, and these early toothed and lizard-tailed birds on the other, we
can have no reasonable doubt in deciding that our own sparrows and
swallows are the remote feathered descendants of an original reptilian
or half-reptilian ancestor.

Why modern birds have lost their long flexible tails it is not
difficult to see. The tail descends to all higher vertebrates as an
heirloom from the fishes, the amphibia, and their other aquatic
predecessors. With these it is a necessary organ of locomotion in
swimming, and it remains almost equally useful to the lithe and gliding
lizard on land. Indeed, the snake is but a lizard who has substituted
this wriggling motion for the use of legs altogether; and we can trace
a gradual succession from the four-legged true lizards, through
snake-like forms with two legs and wholly rudimentary legs, to the
absolutely limbless serpents themselves. But to flying birds, on the
contrary, a long bony tail is only an inconvenience. All that they need
is a little muscular knob for the support of the tail-feathers, which
they employ as a rudder in guiding their flight upward or downward, to
right or left. The elongated waving tail of the Solenhofen bird, with
its single pair of quills, must have been a comparatively ineffectual
and clumsy piece of mechanism for steering an aerial creature through
its novel domain. Accordingly, the bones soon grew fewer in number and
shorter in length, while the feathers simultaneously arranged
themselves side by side upon the terminal hump. As early as the time
when our chalk was deposited, the bird's tail had become what it is at
the present day--a single united bone, consisting of a few scarcely
distinguishable crowded rings. This is the form it assumes in the
toothed fossil birds of Western America. But, as if to preserve the
memory of their reptilian origin, birds in their embryo stage still go
on producing separate caudal vertebrae, only to unite them together at a
later point of their development into the typical coccygean bone.

Much the same sort of process has taken place in the higher apes, and,
as Mr. Darwin would assure us, in man himself. There the long
prehensile tail of the monkeys has grown gradually shorter, and, being
at last coiled up under the haunches, has finally degenerated into an
insignificant and wholly embedded terminal joint. But, indeed, we can
find traces of a similar adaptation to circumstances everywhere. Take,
for instance, the common English amphibians. The newt passes all its
life in the water, and therefore always retains its serviceable tail as
a swimming organ. The frog in its tadpole state is also aquatic, and it
swims wholly by means of its broad and flat rudder-like appendage. But
as its legs bud out and it begins to fit itself for a terrestrial
existence, the tail undergoes a rapid atrophy, and finally fades away
altogether. To a hopping frog on land, such a long train would be a
useless drag, while in the water its webbed feet and muscular legs make
a satisfactory substitute for the lost organ. Last of all, the
tree-frog, leading a specially terrestrial life, has no tadpole at all,
but emerges from the egg in the full frog-like shape. As he never lives
in the water, he never feels the need of a tail.

The edible crab and lobster show us an exactly parallel case amongst
crustaceans. Everybody has noticed that a crab's body is practically
identical with a lobster's, only that in the crab the body-segments are
broad and compact, while the tail, so conspicuous in its kinsman, is
here relatively small and tucked away unobtrusively behind the legs.
This difference in construction depends entirely upon the habits and
manners of the two races. The lobster lives among rocks and ledges; he
uses his small legs but little for locomotion, but he springs
surprisingly fast and far through the water by a single effort of his
powerful muscular tail. As to his big fore-claws, those, we all know,
are organs of prehension and weapons of offence, not pieces of
locomotive mechanism. Hence the edible and muscular part of a lobster
is chiefly to be found in the claws and tail, the latter having
naturally the firmest and strongest flesh. The crab, on the other hand,
lives on the sandy bottom, and walks about on its lesser legs, instead
of swimming or darting through the water by blows of its tail, like the
lobster or the still more active prawn and shrimp. Hence the crab's
tail has dwindled away to a mere useless historical relic, while the
most important muscles in its body are those seated in the network of
shell just above its locomotive legs. In this case, again, it is clear
that the appendage has disappeared because the owner had no further use
for it. Indeed, if one looks through all nature, one will find the
philosophy of tails eminently simple and utilitarian. Those animals
that need them evolve them; those animals that do not need them never
develop them; and those animals that have once had them, but no longer
use them for practical purposes, retain a mere shrivelled rudiment as a
lingering reminiscence of their original habits.




VII.

_BLUE MUD._


After last night's rain, the cliffs that bound the bay have come out in
all their most brilliant colours; so this morning I am turning my steps
seaward, and wandering along the great ridge of pebbles which here
breaks the force of the Channel waves as they beat against the long
line of the Dorset downs. Our cliffs just at this point are composed of
blue lias beneath, with a capping of yellow sandstone on their summits,
above which in a few places the layer of chalk that once topped the
whole country-side has still resisted the slow wear and tear of
unnumbered centuries. These three elements give a variety to the bold
and broken bluffs which is rare along the monotonous southern
escarpment of the English coast. After rain, especially, the changes of
colour on their sides are often quite startling in their vividness and
intensity. To-day, for example, the yellow sandstone is tinged in parts
with a deep russet red, contrasting admirably with the bright green of
the fields above and the sombre steel-blue of the lias belt below.
Besides, we have had so many landslips along this bit of shore, that
the various layers of rock have in more than one place got mixed up
with one another into inextricable confusion. The little town nestling
in the hollow behind me has long been famous as the head-quarters of
early geologists; and not a small proportion of the people earn their
livelihood to the present day by 'goin' a fossiling.' Every child about
the place recognises ammonites as 'snake-stones;' while even the rarer
vertebrae of extinct saurians have acquired a local designation as
'verterberries.' So, whether in search of science or the picturesque, I
often clamber down in this direction for my daily stroll, particularly
when, as is the case to-day, the rain has had time to trickle through
the yellow rock, and the sun then shines full against its face, to
light it up with a rich flood of golden splendour.

The base of the cliffs consists entirely of a very soft and plastic
blue lias mud. This mud contains large numbers of fossils, chiefly
chambered shells, but mixed with not a few relics of the great swimming
and flying lizards that swarmed among the shallow flats or low islands
of the lias sea. When the blue mud was slowly accumulating in the
hollows of the ancient bottom, these huge saurians formed practically
the highest race of animals then existing upon earth. There were, it is
true, a few primaeval kangaroo-mice and wombats among the rank brushwood
of the mainland; and there may even have been a species or two of
reptilian birds, with murderous-looking teeth and long lizard-like
tails--descendants of those problematical creatures which printed their
footmarks on the American trias, and ancestors of the later toothed
bird whose tail-feathers have been naturally lithographed for us on the
Solenhofen slate. But in spite of such rare precursors of higher modern
types, the saurian was in fact the real lord of earth in the lias ocean.

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

We have adopted an easy and slovenly way of dividing all rocks into
primary, secondary, and tertiary, which veils from us the real
chronological relations of evolving life in the different periods. The
lias is ranked by geologists among the earliest secondary formations:
but if we were to distribute all the sedimentary rocks into ten great
epochs, each representing about equal duration in time, the lias would
really fall in the tenth and latest of all. So very misleading to the
ordinary mind is our accepted geological nomenclature. Nay, even
commonplace geologists themselves often overlook the real implications
of many facts and figures which they have learned to quote glibly
enough in a certain off-hand way. Let me just briefly reconstruct the
chief features of this scarcely recognised world's chronology as I sit
on this piece of fallen chalk at the foot of the mouldering cliff,
where the stream from the meadow above brought down the newest landslip
during the hard frosts of last December. First of all, there is the
vast lapse of time represented by the Laurentian rocks of Canada. These
Laurentian rocks, the oldest in the world, are at least 30,000 feet in
thickness, and it must be allowed that it takes a reasonable number of
years to accumulate such a mass of solid limestone or clay as that at
the bottom of even the widest primaeval ocean. In these rocks there are
no fossils, except a single very doubtful member of the very lowest
animal type. But there are indirect traces of life in the shape of
limestone probably derived from shells, and of black lead probably
derived from plants. All these early deposits have been terribly
twisted and contorted by subsequent convulsions of the earth, and most
of them have been melted down by volcanic action; so that we can tell
very little about their original state. Thus the history of life opens
for us, like most other histories, with a period of uncertainty: its
origin is lost in the distant vistas of time. Still, we know that there
_was_ such an early period; and from the thickness of the rocks which
represent it we may conjecture that it spread over three out of the ten
great aeons into which I have roughly divided geological time. Next
comes the period known as the Cambrian, and to it we may similarly
assign about two and a half aeons on like grounds. The Cambrian epoch
begins with a fair sprinkling of the lower animals and plants,
presumably developed during the preceding age; but it shows no remains
of fish or any other vertebrates. To the Silurian, Devonian, and
Carboniferous periods we may roughly allow an aeon and a fraction each:
while to the whole group of secondary and tertiary strata, comprising
almost all the best-known English formations--red marl, lias, oolite,
greensand, chalk, eocene, miocene, pliocene, and drift--we can only
give a single aeon to be divided between them. Such facts will
sufficiently suggest how comparatively modern are all these rocks when
viewed by the light of an absolute chronology. Now, the first fishes do
not occur till the Silurian--that is to say, in or about the seventh
aeon after the beginning of geological time. The first mammals are found
in the trias, at the beginning of the tenth aeon. And the first known
bird only makes its appearance in the oolite, about half-way through
that latest period. This will show that there was plenty of time for
their development in the earlier ages. True, we must reckon the
interval between ourselves and the date of this blue mud at many
millions of years; but then we must reckon the interval between the
lias and the earliest Cambrian strata at some six times as much, and
between the lias and the lowest Laurentian beds at nearly ten times as
much. Just the same sort of lessening perspective exists in geology as
in ordinary history. Most people look upon the age before the Norman
Conquest as a mere brief episode of the English annals; yet six whole
centuries elapsed between the landing of the real or mythical Hengst at
Ebbsfleet and the landing of William the Conqueror at Hastings; while
under eight centuries elapsed between the time of William the Conqueror
and the accession of Queen Victoria. But, just as most English
histories give far more space to the three centuries since Elizabeth
than to the eleven centuries which preceded them, so most books on
geology give far more space to the single aeon (embracing the secondary
and tertiary periods) which comes nearest our own time, than to the
nine aeons which spread from the Laurentian to the Carboniferous epoch.
In the earliest period, records either geological or historical are
wholly wanting; in the later periods they become both more numerous and
more varied in proportion as they approach nearer and nearer to our own
time.

So too, in the days when Mr. Darwin first took away the breath of
scientific Europe by his startling theories, it used confidently to be
said that geology had shown us no intermediate form between species and
species. Even at the time when this assertion was originally made it
was quite untenable. All early geological forms, of whatever race,
belong to what we foolishly call 'generalised' types: that is to say,
they present a mixture of features now found separately in several
different animals. In other words, they represent early ancestors of
all the modern forms, with peculiarities intermediate between those of
their more highly differentiated descendants; and hence we ought to
call them 'unspecialised' rather than 'generalised' types. For example,
the earliest ancestral horse is partly a horse and partly a tapir: we
may regard him as a _tertium quid_, a middle term, from which the horse
has varied in one direction and the tapir in another, each of them
exaggerating certain special peculiarities of the common ancestor and
losing others, in accordance with the circumstances in which they have
been placed. Science is now perpetually discovering intermediate forms,
many of which compose an unbroken series between the unspecialised
ancestral type and the familiar modern creatures. Thus, in this very
case of the horse, Professor Marsh has unearthed a long line of fossil
animals which lead in direct descent from the extremely unhorse-like
eocene type to the developed Arab of our own times. Similarly with
birds, Professor Huxley has shown that there is hardly any gap between
the very bird-like lizards of the lias and the very lizard-like birds
of the oolite. Such links, discovered afresh every day, are perpetual
denials to the old parrot-like cry of 'No geological evidence for
evolution.'




VIII.

_CUCKOO-PINT._


In the bank which supports the hedge, beside this little hanger on
the flank of Black Down, the glossy arrow-headed leaves of the common
arum form at this moment beautiful masses of vivid green foliage.
'Cuckoo-pint' is the pretty poetical old English name for the plant;
but village children know it better by the equally quaint and fanciful
title of 'lords and ladies.' The arum is not now in flower: it
blossomed much earlier in the season, and its queer clustered fruits
are just at present swelling out into rather shapeless little
light-green bulbs, preparatory to assuming the bright coral-red hue
which makes them so conspicuous among the hedgerows during the autumn
months. A cut-and-dry technical botanist would therefore have little to
say to it in its present stage, because he cares only for the flowers
and seeds which help him in his dreary classifications, and give him so
splendid an opportunity for displaying the treasures of his Latinised
terminology. But to me the plant itself is the central point of
interest, not the names (mostly in bad Greek) by which this or that
local orchid-hunter has endeavoured to earn immortality.

This arum, for example, grows first from a small hard seed with a
single lobe or seed-leaf. In the seed there is a little store of starch
and albumen laid up by the mother-plant, on which the young arum feeds,
just as truly as the growing chick feeds on the white which surrounds
its native yolk, or as you and I feed on the similar starches and
albumens laid by for the use of the young plant in the grain of wheat,
or for the young fowl in the egg. Full-grown plants live by taking in
food-stuffs from the air under the influence of sunlight: but a young
seedling can no more feed itself than a human baby can; and so food is
stored up for it beforehand by the parent stock. As the kernel swells
with heat and moisture, its starches and albumens get oxidised and
produce the motions and rearrangements of particles that result in the
growth of a new plant. First a little head rises towards the sunlight
and a little root pushes downward towards the moist soil beneath. The
business of the root is to collect water for the circulating
medium--the sap or blood of the plant--as well as a few mineral matters
required for its stem and cells; but the business of the head is to
spread out into leaves, which are the real mouths and stomachs of the
compound organism. For we must never forget that all plants mainly
grow, not, as most people suppose, from the earth, but from the air.
They are for the most part mere masses of carbon-compounds, and the
carbon in them comes from the carbonic acid diffused through the
atmosphere around, and is separated by the sunlight acting in the
leaves. There it mixes with small quantities of hydrogen and nitrogen
brought by the roots from soil and water; and the starches or other
bodies thus formed are then conveyed by the sap to the places where
they will be required in the economy of the plant system. That is the
all-important fact in vegetable physiology, just as the digestion and
assimilation of food and the circulation of the blood are in our own
bodies.

The arum, like the grain of wheat, has only a single seed-leaf; whereas
the pea, as we all know, has two. This is the most fundamental
difference among flowering plants, as it points back to an early and
deep-seated mode of growth, about which they must have split off from
one another millions of years ago. All the one-lobed plants grow with
stems like grasses or bamboos, formed by single leaves enclosing
another; all the double-lobed plants grow with stems like an oak,
formed of concentric layers from within outward. As soon as the arum,
with its sprouting head, has raised its first leaves far enough above
the ground to reach the sunlight, it begins to form fresh starches and
new leaves for itself, and ceases to be dependent upon the store laid
up in its buried lobe. Most seeds accordingly contain just enough
material to support the young seedling till it is in a position to
shift for itself; and this, of course, varies greatly with the habits
and manners of the particular species. Some plants, too, such as the
potato, find their seeds insufficient to keep up the race by
themselves, and so lay by abundant starches in underground branches or
tubers, for the use of new shoots; and these rich starch receptacles we
ourselves generally utilise as food-stuffs, to the manifest detriment
of the young potato-plants, for whose benefit they were originally
intended. Well, the arum has no such valuable reserve as that; it is
early cast upon its own resources, and so it shifts for itself with
resolution. Its big, glossy leaves grow apace, and soon fill out, not
only with green chlorophyll, but also with a sharp and pungent essence
which makes them burn the mouth like cayenne pepper. This acrid juice
has been acquired by the plant as a defence against its enemies. Some
early ancestor of the arums must have been liable to constant attacks
from rabbits, goats, or other herbivorous animals, and it has adopted
this means of repelling their advances. In other words, those arums
which were most palatable to the rabbits got eaten up and destroyed,
while those which were nastiest survived, and handed down their
pungency to future generations. Just in the same way nettles have
acquired their sting and thistles their prickles, which efficiently
protect them against all herbivores except the patient, hungry donkey,
who gratefully accepts them as a sort of _sauce piquante_ to the
succulent stems.

And now the arum begins its great preparations for the act of
flowering. Everybody knows the general shape of the arum blossom--if
not in our own purple cuckoo-pint, at least in the big white 'AEthiopian
lilies' which form such frequent ornaments of cottage windows. Clearly,
this is a flower which the plant cannot produce without laying up a
good stock of material beforehand. So it sets to work accumulating
starch in its root. This starch it manufactures in its leaves, and then
buries deep underground in a tuber, by means of the sap, so as to
secure it from the attacks of rodents, who too frequently appropriate
to themselves the food intended by plants for other purposes. If you
examine the tuber before the arum has blossomed, you will find it large
and solid; but if you dig it up in the autumn after the seeds have
ripened, you will see that it is flaccid and drained; all its starches
and other contents have gone to make up the flower, the fruit, and the
stalk which bore them. But the tuber has a further protection against
enemies besides its deep underground position. It contains an acrid
juice like that of the leaves, which sufficiently guards it against
four-footed depredators. Man, however, that most persistent of
persecutors, has found out a way to separate the juice from the starch;
and in St. Helena the big white arum is cultivated as a food-plant, and
yields the meal in common use among the inhabitants.

When the arum has laid by enough starch to make a flower it begins to
send up a tall stalk, on the top of which grows the curious hooded
blossom known to be one of the earliest forms still surviving upon
earth. But now its object is to attract, not to repel, the animal
world; for it is an insect-fertilised flower, and it requires the aid
of small flies to carry the pollen from blossom to blossom. For this
purpose it has a purple sheath around its head of flowers and a tall
spike on which they are arranged in two clusters, the male blossoms
above and the female below. This spike is bright yellow in the
cultivated species. The fertilisation is one of the most interesting
episodes in all nature, but it would take too long to describe here in
full. The flies go from one arum to another, attracted by the colour,
in search of pollen; and the pistils, or female flowers, ripen first.
Then the pollen falls from the stamens or male flowers on the bodies of
the flies, and dusts them all over with yellow powder. The insects,
when once they have entered, are imprisoned until the pollen is ready
to drop, by means of several little hairs, pointing downwards, and
preventing their exit on the principle of an eel-trap or lobster-pot.
But as soon as the pollen is discharged the hairs wither away, and then
the flies are free to visit a second arum. Here they carry the
fertilising dust with which they are covered to the ripe pistils, and
so enable them to set their seed; but, instead of getting away again as
soon as they have eaten their fill, they are once more imprisoned by
the lobster-pot hairs, and dusted with a second dose of pollen, which
they carry away in turn to a third blossom.

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




IX.

_BERRIES AND BERRIES._


This little chine, opening toward the sea through the blue lias cliffs,
has been worn to its present pretty gorge-like depth by the slow action
of its tiny stream--a mere thread of water in fine weather, that
trickles down its centre in a series of mossy cascades to the shingly
beach below. Its sides are overgrown by brambles and other prickly
brushwood, which form in places a matted and impenetrable mass: for it
is the habit of all plants protected by the defensive armour of spines
or thorns to cluster together in serried ranks, through which cattle or
other intrusive animals cannot break. Amongst them, near the down
above, I have just lighted upon a rare plant for Southern Britain--a
wild raspberry-bush in full fruit. Raspberries are common enough in
Scotland among heaps of stones on the windiest hillsides; but the south
of England is too warm and sickly for their robust tastes, and they can
only be found here in a few bleak spots like the stony edges of this
weather-beaten down above the chine. The fruit itself is quite as good
as the garden variety, for cultivation has added little to the native
virtues of the raspberry. Good old Izaak Walton is not ashamed to quote
a certain quaint saying of one Dr. Boteler concerning strawberries, and
so I suppose I need not be afraid to quote it after him. 'Doubtless,'
said the Doctor, 'God _could_ have made a better berry, but doubtless
also God never did.' Nevertheless, if you try the raspberry, picked
fresh, with plenty of good country cream, you must allow that it runs
its sister fruit a neck-and-neck race.

To compare the structure of a raspberry with that of a strawberry is a
very instructive botanical study. It shows how similar causes may
produce the same gross result in singularly different ways. Both are
roses by family, and both have flowers essentially similar to that of
the common dog-rose. But even in plants where the flowers are alike,
the fruits often differ conspicuously, because fresh principles come
into play for the dispersion and safe germination of the seed. This
makes the study of fruits the most complicated part in the unravelling
of plant life. After the strawberry has blossomed, the pulpy receptacle
on which it bore its green fruitlets begins to swell and redden, till
at length it grows into an edible berry, dotted with little yellow
nuts, containing each a single seed. But in the raspberry it is the
separate fruitlets themselves which grow soft and bright-,
while the receptacle remains white and tasteless, forming the 'hull'
which we pull off from the berry when we are going to eat it. Thus the
part of the raspberry which we throw away answers to the part of the
strawberry which we eat. Only, in the raspberry the separate fruitlets
are all crowded close together into a single united mass, while in the
strawberry they are scattered about loosely, and embedded in the soft
flesh of the receptacle. The blackberry is another close relative; but
in its fruit the little pulpy fruitlets cling to the receptacle, so
that we pick and eat them both together; whereas in the raspberry the
receptacle pulls out easily, and leaves a thimble-shaped hollow in the
middle of the berry. Each of these little peculiarities has a special
meaning of its own in the history of the different plants.

Yet the main object attained by all is in the end precisely similar.
Strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries all belong to the class of
attractive fruits. They survive in virtue of the attention paid to them
by birds and small animals. Just as the wild strawberry which I picked
in the hedgerow the other day procures the dispersion of its hard and
indigestible fruitlets by getting them eaten together with the pulpy
receptacle, so does the raspberry procure the dispersion of its soft
and sugary fruitlets by getting them eaten all by themselves. While the
strawberry fruitlets retain throughout their dry outer coating, in
those of the raspberry the external covering becomes fleshy and red,
but the inner seed has, notwithstanding, a still harder shell than the
tiny nuts of the strawberry. Now, this is the secret of nine fruits out
of ten. They are really nuts, which clothe themselves in an outer tunic
of sweet and beautifully  pulp. The pulp, as it were, the plant
gives in, as an inducement to the friendly bird to swallow its seed;
but the seed itself it protects by a hard stone or shell, and often by
poisonous or bitter juices within. We see this arrangement very
conspicuously in a plum, or still better in a mango; though it is
really just as evident in the raspberry, where the smaller size renders
it less conspicuous to human sight.

It is a curious fact about the rose family that they have a very marked
tendency to produce such fleshy fruits, instead of the mere dry
seed-vessels of ordinary plants, which are named fruits only by
botanical courtesy. For example, we owe to this single family the
peach, plum, apricot, cherry, damson, pear, apple, medlar, and quince,
all of them cultivated in gardens or orchards for their fruits. The
minor group known by the poetical name of Dryads, alone supplies us
with the strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, and dewberry. Even the
wilder kinds, refused as food by man, produce berries well known to our
winter birds--the haw, rose-hip, sloe, bird-cherry, and rowan. On the
other hand, the whole tribe numbers but a single thoroughgoing nut--the
almond; and even this nut, always somewhat soft-shelled and inclined to
pulpiness, has produced by a 'sport' the wholly fruit-like nectarine.
The odd thing about the rose tribe, however, is this: that the pulpy
tendency shows itself in very different parts among the various
species. In the plum it is the outer covering of the true fruit which
grows soft and : in the apple it is a swollen mass of the
fruit-stalk surrounding the ovules: in the rose-hip it is the hollowed
receptacle: and in the strawberry it is the same receptacle, bulging
out in the opposite direction. Such a general tendency to display
colour and collect sugary juices in so many diverse parts may be
compared to the general bulbous tendency of the tiger-lily or the
onion, and to the general succulent tendency of the cactus or the
house-leek. In each case, the plant benefits by it in one form or
another; and whichever form happens to get the start in any particular
instance is increased and developed by natural selection, just as
favourable varieties of fruits or flowers are increased and developed
in cultivated species by our own gardeners.

Sweet juices and bright colours, however, could be of no use to a plant
till there were eyes to see and tongues to taste them. A pulpy fruit is
in itself a mere waste of productive energy to its mother, unless the
pulpiness aids in the dispersion and promotes the welfare of the young
seedlings. Accordingly, we might naturally expect that there would be
no fruit-bearers on the earth until the time when fruit-eaters, actual
or potential, arrived upon the scene: or, to put it more correctly,
both must inevitably have developed simultaneously and in mutual
dependence upon one another. So we find no traces of succulent fruits
even in so late a formation as that of these lias or cretaceous cliffs.
The birds of that day were fierce-toothed carnivores, devouring the
lizards and saurians of the rank low-lying sea-marshes: the mammals
were mostly primaeval kangaroos or low ancestral wombats, gentle
herbivores, or savage marsupial wolves, like the Tasmanian devil of our
own times. It is only in the very modern tertiary period, whose soft
muddy deposits have not yet had time to harden under superincumbent
pressure into solid stone, that we find the earliest traces of the rose
family, the greatest fruit-bearing tribe of our present world. And side
by side with them we find their clever arboreal allies, the ancestral
monkeys and squirrels, the primitive robins, and the yet shadowy
forefathers of our modern fruit-eating parrots. Just as bees and
butterflies necessarily trace back their geological history only to the
time of the first honey-bearing flowers, and just as the honey-bearing
flowers in turn trace back their pedigree only to the date of the
rudest and most unspecialised honey-sucking insects, so are fruits and
fruit-eaters linked together in origin by the inevitable bond of a
mutual dependence. No bee, no honey; and no honey, no bee: so, too, no
fruit, no fruit-bird; and no fruit-bird, no fruit.




X.

_DISTANT RELATIONS._


Behind the old mill, whose overshot wheel, backed by a wall thickly
covered with the young creeping fronds of hart's-tongue ferns, forms
such a picturesque foreground for the view of our little valley, the
mill-stream expands into a small shallow pond, overhung at its edges by
thick-set hazel-bushes and clambering honeysuckle. Of course it is only
dammed back by a mud wall, with sluices for the miller's water-power;
but it has a certain rustic simplicity of its own, which makes it
beautiful to our eyes for all that, in spite of its utilitarian origin.
At the bottom of this shallow pond you may now see a miracle daily
taking place, which but for its commonness we should regard as an
almost incredible marvel. You may there behold evolution actually
illustrating the transformation of life under your very eyes: you may
watch a low type of gill-breathing gristly-boned fish developing into
the highest form of lung-breathing terrestrial amphibian. Nay,
more--you may almost discover the earliest known ancestor of the whole
vertebrate kind, the first cousin of that once famous ascidian larva,
passing through all the upward stages of existence which finally lead
it to assume the shape of a relatively perfect four-legged animal. For
the pond is swarming with fat black tadpoles, which are just at this
moment losing their tails and developing their legs, on the way to
becoming fully formed frogs.

The tadpole and the ascidian larva divide between them the honour of
preserving for us in all its native simplicity the primitive aspect of
the vertebrate type. Beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes have all
descended from an animal whose shape closely resembled that of these
wriggling little black creatures which dart up and down like imps
through the clear water, and raise a cloud of mud above their heads
each time that they bury themselves comfortably in the soft mud of the
bottom. But while the birds and beasts, on the one hand, have gone on
bettering themselves out of all knowledge, and while the ascidian, on
the other hand, in his adult form has dropped back into an obscure and
sedentary life--sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything--the
tadpole alone, at least during its early days, remains true to the
ancestral traditions of the vertebrate family. When first it emerges
from its egg it represents the very most rudimentary animal with a
backbone known to our scientific teachers. It has a big hammer-looking
head, and a set of branching outside gills, and a short distinct body,
and a long semi-transparent tail. Its backbone is a mere gristly
channel, in which lies its spinal cord. As it grows, it resembles in
every particular the ascidian larva, with which, indeed, Kowalewsky and
Professor Ray Lankester have demonstrated its essential identity. But
since a great many people seem wrongly to imagine that Professor
Lankester's opinion on this matter is in some way at variance with Mr.
Darwin's and Dr. Haeckel's, it may be well to consider what the
degeneracy of the ascidian really means. The fact is, both larval
forms--that of the frog and that of the ascidian--completely agree in
the position of their brains, their gill-slits, their very rudimentary
backbones, and their spinal cords. Moreover, we ourselves and the
tadpole agree with the ascidian in a further most important point,
which no invertebrate animal shares with us; and that is that our eyes
grow out of our brains, instead of being part of our skin, as in
insects and cuttle-fish. This would seem _a priori_ a most inconvenient
place for an eye--inside the brain; but then, as Professor Lankester
cleverly suggests, our common original ancestor, the very earliest
vertebrate of all, must have been a transparent creature, and therefore
comparatively indifferent as to the part of his body in which his eye
happened to be placed. In after ages, however, as vertebrates generally
got to have thicker skulls and tougher skins, the eye-bearing part of
the brain had to grow outward, and so reach the light on the surface of
the body: a thing which actually happens to all birds, beasts, and
reptiles in the course of their embryonic development. So that in this
respect the ascidian larva is nearer to the original type than the
tadpole or any other existing animal.

The ascidian, however, in mature life, has grown degraded and fallen
from his high estate, owing to his bad habit of rooting himself to a
rock and there settling down into a mere sedentary swallower of passing
morsels--a blind, handless, footless, and degenerate thing. In his
later shape he is but a sack fixed to a stone, and with all his limbs
and higher sense-organs so completely atrophied that only his earlier
history allows us to recognise him as a vertebrate by descent at all.
He is in fact a representative of retrogressive development. The
tadpole, on the contrary, goes on swimming about freely, and keeping
the use of its eyes, till at last a pair of hind legs and then a pair
of fore legs begin to bud out from its side, and its tail fades away,
and its gills disappear, and air-breathing lungs take their place, and
it boldly hops on shore a fully evolved tailless amphibian.

There is, however, one interesting question about these two larvae which
I should much like to solve. The ascidian has only _one_ eye inside its
useless brain, while the tadpole and all other vertebrates have _two_
from the very first. Now which of us most nearly represents the old
mud-loving vertebrate ancestor in this respect? Have two original
organs coalesced in the young ascidian, or has one organ split up into
a couple with the rest of the class? I think the latter is the true
supposition, and for this reason: In our heads, and those of all
vertebrates, there is a curious cross-connection between the eyes and
the brain, so that the right optic nerve goes to the left side of the
brain and the left optic nerve goes to the right side. In higher
animals, this 'decussation,' as anatomists call it, affects all the
sense-organs except those of smell; but in fishes it only affects the
eyes. Now, as the young ascidian has retained the ancestral position of
his almost useless eye so steadily, it is reasonable to suppose that he
has retained its other peculiarities as well. May we not conclude,
therefore, that the primitive vertebrate had only one brain-eye; but
that afterwards, as this brain-eye grew outward to the surface, it
split up into two, because of the elongated and flattened form of the
head in swimming animals, while its two halves still kept up a memory
of their former union in the cross-connection with the opposite halves
of the brain? If this be so, then we might suppose that the other
organs followed suit, so as to prevent confusion in the brain between
the two sides of the body; while the nose, which stands in the centre
of the face, was under no liability to such error, and therefore still
keeps up its primitive direct arrangement.

It is worth noting, too, that these tadpoles, like all other very low
vertebrates, are mud-haunters; and the most primitive among adult
vertebrates are still cartilaginous mud-fish. Not much is known
geologically about the predecessors of frogs; the tailless amphibians
are late arrivals upon earth, and it may seem curious, therefore, that
they should recall in so many ways the earliest ancestral type. The
reason doubtless is because they are so much given to larval
development. Some ancestors of theirs--primaeval newts or
salamanders--must have gone on for countless centuries improving
themselves in their adult shape from age to age, yet bringing all their
young into the world from the egg, as mere mud-fish still, in much the
same state as their unimproved forefathers had done millions of aeons
before. Similarly, caterpillars are still all but exact patterns of the
primaeval insect, while butterflies are totally different and far higher
creatures. Thus, in spite of adult degeneracy in the ascidian and adult
progress in the frog, both tadpoles preserve for us very nearly the
original form of their earliest backboned ancestor. Each individual
recapitulates in its own person the whole history of evolution in its
race. This is a very lucky thing for biology; since without these
recapitulatory phases we could never have traced the true lines of
descent in many cases. It would be a real misfortune for science if
every frog had been born a typical amphibian, as some tree-toads
actually are, and if every insect had emerged a fully formed adult, as
some aphides very nearly do. Larvae and embryos show us the original
types of each race; adults show us the total amount of change produced
by progressive or retrogressive development.




XI.

_AMONG THE HEATHER._


This is the worst year for butterflies that I can remember.
Entomologists all over England are in despair at the total failure of
the insect crop, and have taken to botanising, angling, and other bad
habits, in default of means for pursuing their natural avocation as
beetle-stickers. Last year's heavy rains killed all the mothers as they
emerged from the chrysalis; and so only a few stray eggs have survived
till this summer, when the butterflies they produce will all be needed
to keep up next season's supply. Nevertheless, I have climbed the
highest down in this part of the country to-day, and come out for an
airing among the heather, in the vague hope that I may be lucky enough
to catch a glimpse of one or two old lepidopterous favourites. I am not
a butterfly-hunter myself. I have not the heart to drive pins through
the pretty creatures' downy bodies, or to stifle them with reeking
chemicals; though I recognise the necessity for a hardened class who
will perform that useful office on behalf of science and society, just
as I recognise the necessity for slaughtermen and knackers. But I
prefer personally to lie on the ground at my ease and learn as much
about the insect nature as I can discover from simple inspection of the
living subject as it flits airily from bunch to bunch of
bright- flowers.

I suppose even that apocryphal person, the general reader, would be
insulted at being told at this hour of the day that all bright-
flowers are fertilised by the visits of insects, whose attentions they
are specially designed to solicit. Everybody has heard over and over
again that roses, orchids, and columbines have acquired their honey to
allure the friendly bee, their gaudy petals to advertise the honey, and
their divers shapes to ensure the proper fertilisation by the correct
type of insect. But everybody does not know how specifically certain
blossoms have laid themselves out for a particular species of fly,
beetle, or tiny moth. Here on the higher downs, for instance, most
flowers are exceptionally large and brilliant; while all Alpine
climbers must have noticed that the most gorgeous masses of bloom in
Switzerland occur just below the snow-line. The reason is, that such
blossoms must be fertilised by butterflies alone. Bees, their great
rivals in honey-sucking, frequent only the lower meadows and <DW72>s,
where flowers are many and small: they seldom venture far from the hive
or the nest among the high peaks and chilly nooks where we find those
great patches of blue gentian or purple anemone, which hang like
monstrous breadths of tapestry upon the mountain sides. This heather
here, now fully opening in the warmer sun of the southern counties--it
is still but in the bud among the Scotch hills, I doubt not--specially
lays itself out for the bumblebee, and its masses form about his
highest pasture-grounds; but the butterflies--insect vagrants that they
are--have no fixed home, and they therefore stray far above the level
at which bee-blossoms altogether cease to grow. Now, the butterfly
differs greatly from the bee in his mode of honey-hunting; he does not
bustle about in a business-like manner from one buttercup or
dead-nettle to its nearest fellow; but he flits joyously, like a
sauntering straggler that he is, from a great patch of colour here to
another great patch at a distance, whose gleam happens to strike his
roving eye by its size and brilliancy. Hence, as that indefatigable
observer, Dr. Hermann Mueller, has noticed, all Alpine or hill-top
flowers have very large and conspicuous blossoms, generally grouped
together in big clusters so as to catch a passing glance of the
butterfly's eye. As soon as the insect spies such a cluster, the colour
seems to act as a stimulant to his broad wings, just as the
candle-light does to those of his cousin the moth. Off he sails at
once, as if by automatic action, towards the distant patch, and there
both robs the plant of its honey and at the same time carries to it on
his legs and head fertilising pollen from the last of its congeners
which he favoured with a call. For of course both bees and butterflies
stick on the whole to a single species at a time; or else the flowers
would only get uselessly hybridised instead of being impregnated with
pollen from other plants of their own kind. For this purpose it is that
most plants lay themselves out to secure the attention of only two or
three varieties among their insect allies, while they make their
nectaries either too deep or too shallow for the convenience of all
other kinds. Nature, though eager for cross-fertilisation, abhors
'miscegenation' with all the bitterness of an American politician.

Insects, however, differ much from one another in their aesthetic
tastes, and flowers are adapted accordingly to the varying fancies of
the different kinds. Here, for example, is a spray of common white
galium, which attracts and is fertilised by small flies, who generally
frequent white blossoms. But here, again, not far off, I find a
luxuriant mass of the yellow species, known by the quaint name of
'lady's bedstraw'--a legacy from the old legend which represents it as
having formed Our Lady's bed in the manger at Bethlehem. Now why has
this kind of galium yellow flowers, while its near kinsman yonder has
them snowy white? The reason is that lady's bedstraw is fertilised by
small beetles; and beetles are known to be one among the most
colour-loving races of insects. You may often find one of their number,
the lovely bronze and golden-mailed rose-chafer, buried deeply in the
very centre of a red garden rose, and reeling about when touched as if
drunk with pollen and honey. Almost all the flowers which beetles
frequent are consequently brightly decked in scarlet or yellow. On the
other hand, the whole family of the umbellates, those tall plants with
level bunches of tiny blossoms, like the fool's parsley, have all but
universally white petals; and Mueller, the most statistical of
naturalists, took the trouble to count the number of insects which paid
them a visit. He found that only 14 per cent. were bees, while the
remainder consisted mainly of miscellaneous small flies and other
arthropodous riff-raff; whereas in the brilliant class of composites,
including the asters, sunflowers, daisies, dandelions, and thistles,
nearly 75 per cent. of the visitors were steady, industrious bees.
Certain dingy blossoms which lay themselves out to attract wasps are
obviously adapted, as Mueller quaintly remarks, 'to a less aesthetically
cultivated circle of visitors.' But the most brilliant among all
insect-fertilised flowers are those which specially affect the society
of butterflies; and they are only surpassed in this respect throughout
all nature by the still larger and more magnificent tropical species
which owe their fertilisation to humming-birds and brush-tongued
lories.

Is it not a curious, yet a comprehensible circumstance, that the tastes
which thus show themselves in the development, by natural selection, of
lovely flowers, should also show themselves in the marked preference
for beautiful mates? Poised on yonder sprig of harebell stands a little
purple-winged butterfly, one of the most exquisite among our British
kinds. That little butterfly owes its own rich and delicately shaded
tints to the long selective action of a million generations among its
ancestors. So we find throughout that the most beautifully 
birds and insects are always those which have had most to do with the
production of bright- fruits and flowers. The butterflies and
rose-beetles are the most gorgeous among insects: the humming-birds and
parrots are the most gorgeous among birds. Nay more, exactly like
effects have been produced in two hemispheres on different tribes by
the same causes. The plain brown swifts of the North have developed
among tropical West Indian and South American orchids the metallic
gorgets and crimson crests of the humming-bird: while a totally unlike
group of Asiatic birds have developed among the rich flora of India and
the Malay Archipelago the exactly similar plumage of the exquisite
sun-birds. Just as bees depend upon flowers, and flowers upon bees, so
the colour-sense of animals has created the bright petals of blossoms;
and the bright petals have reacted upon the tastes of the animals
themselves, and through their tastes upon their own appearance.




XII.

_SPECKLED TROUT._


It is a piece of the common vanity of anglers to suppose that they know
something about speckled trout. A fox might almost as well pretend that
he was intimately acquainted with the domestic habits of poultry, or an
Iroquois describe the customs of the Algonquins from observations made
upon the specimens who had come under his scalping-knife. I will allow
that anglers are well versed in the necessity for fishing up-stream
rather than in the opposite direction; and I grant that they have
attained an empirical knowledge of the aesthetic preferences of trout in
the matter of blue duns and red palmers; but that as a body they are
familiar with the speckled trout at home I deny. If you wish to learn
all about the race in its own life you must abjure rod and line, and
creep quietly to the side of the pools in an unfished brooklet, like
this on whose bank I am now seated; and then, if you have taken care
not to let your shadow fall upon the water, you may sit and watch the
live fish themselves for an hour together, as they bask lazily in the
sunlight, or rise now and then at cloudy moments with a sudden dart at
a May-fly who is trying in vain to lay her eggs unmolested on the
surface of the stream. The trout in my little beck are fortunately too
small even for poachers to care for tickling them: so I am able
entirely to preserve them as objects for philosophical contemplation,
without any danger of their being scared away from their accustomed
haunts by intrusive anglers.

Trout always have a recognised home of their own, inhabited by a pretty
fixed number of individuals. But if you catch the two sole denizens of
a particular scour, you will find another pair installed in their place
to-morrow. Young fry seem always ready to fill up the vacancies caused
by the involuntary retirement of their elders. Their size depends
almost entirely upon the quantity of food they can get; for an adult
fish may weigh anything at any time of his life, and there is no limit
to the dimensions they may theoretically attain. Mr. Herbert Spencer,
who is an angler as well as a philosopher, well observes that where the
trout are many they are generally small; and where they are large they
are generally few. In the mill-stream down the valley they measure only
six inches, though you may fill a basket easily enough on a cloudy day;
but in the canal reservoir, where there are only half-a-dozen fish
altogether, a magnificent eight-pounder has been taken more than once.
In this way we can understand the origin of the great lake trout, which
weigh sometimes forty pounds. They are common trout which have taken to
living in broader waters, where large food is far more abundant, but
where shoals of small fish would starve. The peculiarities thus
impressed upon them have been handed down to their descendants, till at
length they have become sufficiently marked to justify us in regarding
them as a separate species. But it is difficult to say what makes a
species in animals so very variable as fish. There are, in fact, no
less than twelve kinds of trout wholly peculiar to the British Islands,
and some of these are found in very restricted areas. Thus, the Loch
Stennis trout inhabits only the tarns of Orkney; the Galway sea trout
lives nowhere but along the west coast of Ireland; the gillaroo never
strays out of the Irish loughs; the Killin charr is confined to a
single sheet of water in Mayo; and other species belong exclusively to
the Llanberis lakes, to Lough Melvin, or to a few mountain pools of
Wales and Scotland. So great is the variety that may be produced by
small changes of food and habitat. Even the salmon himself is only a
river trout who has acquired the habit of going down to the sea, where
he gets immensely increased quantities of food (for all the trout kind
are almost omnivorous), and grows big in proportion. But he still
retains many marks of his early existence as a river fish. In the first
place, every salmon is hatched from the egg in fresh water, and grows
up a mere trout. The young parr, as the salmon is called in this stage
of its growth, is actually (as far as physiology goes) a mature fish,
and is capable of producing milt, or male spawn, which long caused it
to be looked upon as a separate species. It really represents, however,
the early form of the salmon, before he took to his annual excursion to
the sea. The ancestral fish, only a hundredth fraction in weight of his
huge descendant, must have somehow acquired the habit of going
seaward--possibly from a drying up of his native stream in seasons of
drought. In the sea, he found himself suddenly supplied with an
unwonted store of food, and grew, like all his kind under similar
circumstances, to an extraordinary size. Thus he attains, as it were,
to a second and final maturity. But salmon cannot lay their eggs in the
sea; or at least, if they did, the young parr would starve for want of
their proper food, or else be choked by the salt water, to which the
old fish have acclimatised themselves. Accordingly, with the return of
the spawning season there comes back an instinctive desire to seek once
more the native fresh water. So the salmon return up stream to spawn,
and the young are hatched in the kind of surroundings which best suit
their tender gills. This instinctive longing for the old home may
probably have arisen during an intermediate stage, when the developing
species still haunted only the brackish water near the river mouths;
and as those fish alone which returned to the head waters could
preserve their race, it would soon grow hardened into a habit engrained
in the nervous system, like the migration of birds or the clustering of
swarming bees around their queen. In like manner the Jamaican
land-crabs, which themselves live on the mountain-tops, come down every
year to lay their eggs in the Caribbean; because, like all other crabs,
they pass their first larval stage as swimming tadpoles, and afterwards
take instinctively to the mountains, as the salmon takes to the sea.
Such a habit could only have arisen by one generation after another
venturing further and further inland, while always returning at the
proper season to the native element for the deposition of the eggs.

These trout here, however, differ from the salmon in one important
particular beside their relative size, and that is that they are
beautifully speckled in their mature form, instead of being merely
silvery like the larger species. The origin of the pretty speckles is
probably to be found in the constant selection by the fish of the most
beautiful among their number as mates. Just as singing birds are in
their fullest and clearest song at the nesting period, and just as many
brilliant species only possess their gorgeous plumage while they are
going through their courtship, and lose the decoration after the young
brood is hatched, so the trout are most brightly  at spawning
time, and become lank and dingy after the eggs have been safely
deposited. The parent fish ascend to the head-waters of their native
river during the autumn season to spawn, and then, their glory dimmed,
they return down-stream to the deep pools, where they pass the winter
sulkily, as if ashamed to show themselves in their dull and dusky
suits. But when spring comes round once more, and flies again become
abundant, the trout begin to move up-stream afresh, and soon fatten out
to their customary size and brilliant colours. It might seem at first
sight that creatures so humble as these little fish could hardly have
sufficiently developed aesthetic tastes to prefer one mate above
another on the score of beauty. But we must remember that every species
is very sensitive to small points of detail in its own kind, and that
the choice would only be exerted between mates generally very like one
another, so that extremely minute differences must necessarily turn the
scale in favour of one particular suitor rather than his rivals.
Anglers know that trout are attracted by bright colours, that they can
distinguish the different flies upon which they feed, and that
artificial flies must accordingly be made at least into a rough
semblance of the original insects. Some scientific fishermen even
insist that it is no use offering them a brown drake at the time of
year or the hour of day when they are naturally expecting a red
spinner. Of course their sight is by no means so perfect as our own,
but it probably includes a fair idea of form, and an acute perception
of colour, while there is every reason to believe that all the trout
family have a decided love of metallic glitter, such as that of silver
or of the salmon's scales. Mr. Darwin has shown that the little
stickleback goes through an elaborate courtship, and I have myself
watched trout which seemed to me as obviously love-making as any pair
of turtle-doves I ever saw. In their early life salmon fry and young
trout are almost quite indistinguishable, being both marked with blue
patches (known as 'finger-marks') on their sides, which are remnants of
the ancestral colouring once common to the whole race. But as they grow
up, their later-acquired tastes begin to produce a divergence, due
originally to this selective preference of certain beautiful mates; and
the adult salmon clothes himself from head to tail in sheeny silver,
while the full-grown trout decks his sides with the beautiful speckles
which have earned him his popular name. Countless generations of slight
differences, selected from time to time by the strongest and handsomest
fish, have sufficed at length to bring about these conspicuous
variations from the primitive type, which the young of both races still
preserve.




XIII.

_DODDER AND BROOMRAPE._


This afternoon, strolling through the under-cliff, I have come across
two quaint and rather uncommon flowers among the straggling brushwood.
One of them is growing like a creeper around the branches of this
overblown gorse-bush. It is the lesser dodder, a pretty clustering mass
of tiny pale pink convolvulus blossoms. The stem consists of a long red
thread, twining round and round the gorse, and bursting out here and
there into thick bundles of beautiful bell-shaped flowers. But where
are the leaves? You may trace the red threads through their
labyrinthine windings up and down the supporting gorse-branches all in
vain: there is not a leaf to be seen. As a matter of fact, the dodder
has none. It is one of the most thorough-going parasites in all nature.
Ordinary green-leaved plants live by making starches for themselves out
of the carbonic acid in the air, under the influence of sunlight; but
the dodder simply fastens itself on to another plant, sends down
rootlets or suckers into its veins, and drinks up sap stored with
ready-made starches or other foodstuffs, originally destined by its
host for the supply of its own growing leaves, branches, and blossoms.
It lives upon the gorse just as parasitically as the little green
aphides live upon our rose-bushes. The material which it uses up in
pushing forth its long thread-like stem and clustered bells is so much
dead loss to the unfortunate plant on which it has fixed itself.

Old-fashioned books tell us that the mistletoe is a perfect parasite,
while the dodder is an imperfect one; and I believe almost all
botanists will still repeat the foolish saying to the present day. But
it really shows considerable haziness as to what a true parasite is.
The mistletoe is a plant which has taken, it is true, to growing upon
other trees. Its very viscid berries are useful for attaching the seeds
to the trunk of the oak or the apple; and there it roots itself into
the body of its host. But it soon produces real green leaves of its
own, which contain the ordinary chlorophyll found in other leaves, and
help it to manufacture starch, under the influence of sunlight, on its
own account. It is not, therefore, a complete drag upon the tree which
it infests; for though it takes sap and mineral food from the host, it
supplies itself with carbon, which is after all the important thing for
plant-life. Dodder, however, is a parasite pure and simple. Its seeds
fall originally upon the ground, and there root themselves at first
like those of any other plant. But, as it grows, its long twining stem
begins to curl for support round some other and stouter stalk. If it
stopped there, and then produced leaves of its own, like the
honeysuckle and the clematis, there would be no great harm done: and
the dodder would be but another climbing plant the more in our flora.
However, it soon insidiously repays the support given it by sending
down little bud-like suckers, through which it draws up nourishment
from the gorse or clover on which it lives. Thus it has no need to
develop leaves of its own; and it accordingly employs all its stolen
material in sending forth matted thread-like stems and bunch after
bunch of bright flowers. As these increase and multiply, they at last
succeed in drawing away all the nutriment from the supporting plant,
which finally dies under the constant drain, just as a horse might die
under the attacks of a host of leeches. But this matters little to the
dodder, which has had time to be visited and fertilised by insects, and
to set and ripen its numerous seeds. One species, the greater dodder,
is thus parasitic upon hops and nettles; a second kind twines round
flax; and the third, which I have here under my eyes, mainly confines
its dangerous attentions to gorse, clover, and thyme. All of them are,
of course, deadly enemies to the plants they infest.

How the dodder acquired this curious mode of life it is not difficult
to see. By descent it is a bind-weed, or wild convolvulus, and its
blossoms are in the main miniature convolvulus blossoms still. Now, all
bind-weeds, as everybody knows, are climbing plants, which twine
themselves round stouter stems for mere physical support This is in
itself a half-parasitic habit, because it enables the plant to dispense
with the trouble of making a thick and solid stem for its own use. But
just suppose that any bind-weed, instead of merely twining, were to put
forth here and there little tendrils, something like those of the ivy,
which managed somehow to grow into the bark of the host, and so
naturally graft themselves to its tissues. In that case the plant would
derive nutriment from the stouter stem with no expense to itself, and
it might naturally be expected to grow strong and healthy, and hand
down its peculiarities to its descendants. As the leaves would thus be
rendered needless, they would first become very much reduced in size,
and would finally disappear altogether, according to the universal
custom of unnecessary organs. So we should get at length a leafless
plant, with numerous flowers and seeds, just like the dodder.
Parasites, in fact, whether animal or vegetable, always end by becoming
mere reproductive sacs, mechanisms for the simple elaboration of eggs
or seeds. This is just what has happened to the dodder before me.

The other queer plant here is a broomrape. It consists of a tall,
somewhat faded-looking stem, upright instead of climbing, and covered
with brown or purplish scales in the place of leaves. Its flowers
resemble the scales in colour, and the dead-nettle in shape. It is, in
fact, a parasitic dead-nettle, a trifle less degenerate as yet than the
dodder. This broomrape has acquired somewhat the same habits as the
other plant, only that it fixes itself on the roots of clover or broom,
from which it sucks nutriment by its own root, as the dodder does by
its stem-suckers. Of course it still retains in most particulars its
original characteristics as a dead-nettle; it grows with their upright
stem and their curiously shaped flowers, so specially adapted for
fertilisation by insect visitors. But it has naturally lost its leaves,
for which it has no further use, and it possesses no chlorophyll, as
the mistletoe does. Yet it has not probably been parasitic for as long
a time as the dodder, since it still retains a dwindling trace of its
leaves in the shape of dry purply scales, something like those of young
asparagus shoots. These leaves are now, in all likelihood, actually
undergoing a gradual atrophy, and we may fairly expect that in the
course of a few thousand years they will disappear altogether. At
present, however, they remain very conspicuous by their colour, which
is not green, owing to the absence of chlorophyll, but is due to the
same pigment as that of the blossoms. This generally happens with
parasites, or with that other curious sort of plants known as
saprophytes, which live upon decaying living matter in the mould of
forests. As they need no green leaves, but have often inherited leafy
structures of some sort, in a more or less degenerate condition, from
their self-supporting ancestors, they usually display most beautiful
colours in their stems and scales, and several of them rank amongst our
handsomest hot-house plants. Even the dodder has red stalks. Their only
work in life being to elaborate the materials stolen from their host
into the brilliant pigments used in the petals for attracting insect
fertilisers, they pour this same dye into the stems and scales, which
thus render them still more conspicuous to the insects' eyes. Moreover,
as they use their whole material in producing flowers, many of these
are very large and handsome; one huge Sumatran species has a blossom
which measures three feet across. On the other hand, their seeds are
usually small and very numerous. Thousands of seeds must fall on
unsuitable places, spring up, and waste all their tiny store of
nourishment, find no host at hand on which to fasten themselves, and so
die down for want of food. It is only by producing a few thousand young
plants for every one destined ultimately to survive that dodders and
broomrapes manage to preserve their types at all.




XIV.

_DOG'S MERCURY AND PLANTAIN._


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

Dog's mercury is one of the oddest English flowers I know. Each blossom
has three small green petals, and either several stamens, or else a
pistil, in the centre. There is nothing particularly remarkable in the
flower being green, for thousands of other flowers are green and we
never notice them as in any way unusual. In fact, we never as a rule
notice green blossoms at all. Yet anybody who picked a piece of dog's
mercury could not fail to be struck by its curious appearance. It does
not in the least resemble the inconspicuous green flowers of the
stinging-nettle, or of most forest trees: it has a very distinct set of
petals which at once impress one with the idea that they ought to be
. And so indeed they ought: for dog's mercury is a degenerate
plant which once possessed a brilliant corolla and was fertilised by
insects, but which has now fallen from its high estate and reverted to
the less advanced mode of fertilisation by the intermediation of the
wind. For some unknown reason or other this species and all its
relations have discovered that they get on better by the latter and
usually more wasteful plan than by the former and usually more
economical one. Hence they have given up producing large bright petals,
because they no longer need to attract the eyes of insects; and they
have also given up the manufacture of honey, which under their new
circumstances would be a mere waste of substance to them. But the dog's
mercury still retains a distinct mark of its earlier insect-attracting
habits in these three diminutive petals. Others of its relations have
lost even these, so that the original floral form is almost completely
obscured in their case. The spurges are familiar English roadside
examples, and their flowers are so completely degraded that even
botanists for a long time mistook their nature and analogies.

The male and female flowers of dog's mercury have taken to living upon
separate plants. Why is this? Well, there was no doubt a time when
every blossom had both stamens and pistil, as dog-roses and buttercups
always have. But when the plant took to wind fertilisation it underwent
a change of structure. The stamens on some blossoms became aborted,
while the pistil became aborted on others. This was necessary in order
to prevent self-fertilisation; for otherwise the pollen of each
blossom, hanging out as it does to the wind, would have been very
liable to fall upon its own pistil. But the present arrangement
obviates any such contingency, by making one plant bear all the male
flowers and another plant all the female ones. Why, again, are the
petals green? I think because dog's mercury would be positively injured
by the visits of insects. It has no honey to offer them, and if they
came to it at all, they would only eat up the pollen itself. Hence I
suspect that those flowers among the mercuries which showed any
tendency to retain the original  petals would soon get weeded
out, because insects would eat up all their pollen, thus preventing
them from fertilising others; while those which had green petals would
never be noticed and so would be permitted to fertilise one another
after their new fashion. In fact, when a blossom which has once
depended upon insects for its fertilisation is driven by circumstances
to depend upon the wind, it seems to derive a positive advantage from
losing all those attractive features by which its ancestors formerly
allured the eyes of bees or beetles.

Here, again, on the roadside is a bit of plantain. Everybody knows its
flat rosette of green leaves and its tall spike of grass-like blossom,
with long stamens hanging out to catch the breeze. Now plantain is a
case exactly analogous to dog's mercury. It is an example of a degraded
blossom. Once upon a time it was a sort of distant cousin to the
veronica, that pretty sky-blue speedwell which abounds among the
meadows in June and July. But these particular speedwells gave up
devoting themselves to insects and became adapted for fertilisation by
the wind instead. So you must look close at them to see at all that the
flowering spike is made up of a hundred separate little four-rayed
blossoms, whose pale and faded petals are tucked away out of sight flat
against the stem. Yet their shape and arrangement distinctly recall the
beautiful veronica, and leave one in little doubt as to the origin of
the plant. At the same time a curious device has sprung up which
answers just the same purpose as the separation of the male and female
flowers on the dog's mercury. Each plantain blossom has both stamens
and pistils, but the pistils come to maturity first, and are fertilised
by pollen blown to them from some neighbouring spike. Their feathery
plumes are admirably adapted for catching and utilising any stray
golden grain which happens to pass that way. After the pistils have
faded, the stamens ripen, and hang out at the end of long waving
filaments, so as to discharge all their pollen with effect. On each
spike of blossoms the lower flowerets open first; and so, if you pick a
half-blown spike, you will see that all the stamens are ripe below, and
all the pistils above. Were the opposite arrangement to occur, the
pollen would fall from the stamens to the lower flowers of the same
stalk; but as the pistils below have always been fertilised and
withered before the stamens ripen, there is no chance of any such
accident and its consequent evil results. Thus one can see clearly that
the plantain has become wholly adapted to wind-fertilisation, and as a
natural effect has all but lost its bright- corolla.

Common groundsel is also a case of the same kind; but here the
degradation has not gone nearly so far. I venture to conjecture,
therefore, that groundsel has been embarked for a shorter time upon its
downward course. For evolution is not, as most people seem to fancy, a
thing which used once to take place; it is a process taking place
around us every day, and it must necessarily continue to take place to
the end of all time. By family the groundsel is a daisy; but it has
acquired the strange and somewhat abnormal habit of self-fertilisation,
which in all probability will ultimately lead to its total extinction.
Hence it does not need the assistance of insects; and it has
accordingly never developed or else got rid of the bright outer
ray-florets which may once have attracted them. Its tiny bell-shaped
blossoms still retain their dwarf yellow corollas; but they are almost
hidden by the green cup-like investment of the flower-head, and they
are not conspicuous enough to arrest the attention of the passing
flies. Here, then, we have an example of a plant just beginning to
start on the retrograde path already traversed by the plantain and the
spurges. If we could meet prophetically with a groundsel of some remote
future century, I have little doubt we should find its bell-shaped
petals as completely degraded as those of the plantain in our own day.

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




XV.

_BUTTERFLY PSYCHOLOGY._


A small red-and-black butterfly poises statuesque above the purple
blossom of this tall field-thistle. With its long sucker it probes
industriously floret after floret of the crowded head, and extracts
from each its wee drop of buried nectar. As it stands just at present,
the dull outer sides of its four wings are alone displayed, so that it
does not form a conspicuous mark for passing birds; but when it has
drunk up the last drop of honey from the thistle flower, and flits
joyously away to seek another purple mass of the same sort, it will
open its red-spotted vans in the sunlight, and will then show itself
off as one among the prettiest of our native insects. Each thistle-head
consists of some two hundred separate little bell-shaped blossoms,
crowded together for the sake of conspicuousness into a single group,
just as the blossoms of the lilac or the syringa are crowded into
larger though less dense clusters; and, as each separate floret has a
nectary of its own, the bee or butterfly who lights upon the compound
flower-group can busy himself for a minute or two in getting at the
various drops of honey without the necessity for any further change of
position than that of revolving upon his own axis. Hence these
composite flowers are great favourites with all insects whose suckers
are long enough to reach the bottom of their slender tubes.

The butterfly's view of life is doubtless on the whole a cheerful one.
Yet his existence must be something so nearly mechanical that we
probably overrate the amount of enjoyment which he derives from
flitting about so airily among the flowers, and passing his days in the
unbroken amusement of sucking liquid honey. Subjectively viewed, the
butterfly is not a high order of insect; his nervous system does not
show that provision for comparatively spontaneous thought and action
which we find in the more intelligent orders, like the flies, bees,
ants, and wasps. His nerves are all frittered away in little separate
ganglia distributed among the various segments of his body, instead of
being governed by a single great central organ, or brain, whose
business it always is to correlate and co-ordinate complex external
impressions. This shows that the butterfly's movements are almost all
automatic, or simply dependent upon immediate external stimulants: he
has not even that small capacity for deliberation and spontaneous
initiative which belongs to his relation the bee. The freedom of the
will is nothing to him, or extends at best to the amount claimed on
behalf of Buridan's ass: he can just choose which of two equidistant
flowers shall first have the benefit of his attention, and nothing
else. Whatever view we take on the abstract metaphysical question, it
is at least certain that the higher animals can do much more than this.
Their brain is able to correlate a vast number of external impressions,
and to bring them under the influence of endless ideas or experiences,
so as finally to evolve conduct which differs very widely with
different circumstances and different characters. Even though it be
true, as determinists believe (and I reckon myself among them), that
such conduct is the necessary result of a given character and given
circumstances--or, if you will, of a particular set of nervous
structures and a particular set of external stimuli--yet we all know
that it is capable of varying so indefinitely, owing to the complexity
of the structures, as to be practically incalculable. But it is not so
with the butterfly. His whole life is cut out for him beforehand; his
nervous connections are so simple, and correspond so directly with
external stimuli, that we can almost predict with certainty what line
of action he will pursue under any given circumstances. He is, as it
were, but a piece of half-conscious mechanism, answering immediately to
impulses from without, just as the thermometer answers to variations of
temperature, and as the telegraphic indicator answers to each making
and breaking of the electric current.

In early life the future butterfly emerges from the egg as a
caterpillar. At once his many legs begin to move, and the caterpillar
moves forward by their motion. But the mechanism which set them moving
was the nervous system, with its ganglia working the separate legs of
each segment. This movement is probably quite as automatic as the act
of sucking in the new-born infant. The caterpillar walks, it knows not
why, but simply because it has to walk. When it reaches a fit place for
feeding, which differs according to the nature of the particular larva,
it feeds automatically. Certain special external stimulants of sight,
smell, or touch set up the appropriate actions in the mandibles, just
as contact of the lips with an external body sets up sucking in the
infant. All these movements depend upon what we call instinct--that is
to say, organic habits registered in the nervous system of the race.
They have arisen by natural selection alone, because those insects
which duly performed them survived, and those which did not duly
perform them died out. After a considerable span of life spent in
feeding and walking about in search of more food, the caterpillar one
day found itself compelled by an inner monitor to alter its habits.
Why, it knew not; but, just as a tired child sinks to sleep, the gorged
and full-fed caterpillar sank peacefully into a dormant state. Then its
tissues melted one by one into a kind of organic pap, and its outer
skin hardened into a chrysalis. Within that solid case new limbs and
organs began to grow by hereditary impulses. At the same time the form
of the nervous system altered, to suit the higher and freer life for
which the insect was unconsciously preparing itself. Fewer and smaller
ganglia now appeared in the tail segments (since no legs would any
longer be needed there), while more important ones sprang up to govern
the motions of the four wings. But it was in the head that the greatest
changes took place. There, a rudimentary brain made its appearance,
with large optic centres, answering to the far more perfect and
important eyes of the future butterfly. For the flying insect will have
to steer its way through open space, instead of creeping over leaves
and stones; and it will have to suck the honey of flowers, as well as
to choose its fitting mate, all of which demands from it higher and
keener senses than those of the purblind caterpillar. At length one day
the chrysalis bursts asunder, and the insect emerges to view on a
summer morning as a full-fledged and beautiful butterfly.

For a minute or two it stands and waits till the air it breathes has
filled out its wings, and till the warmth and sunlight have given it
strength. For the wings are by origin a part of the breathing
apparatus, and they require to be plimmed by the air before the insect
can take to flight. Then, as it grows more accustomed to its new life,
the hereditary impulse causes it to spread its vans abroad, and it
flies. Soon a flower catches its eye, and the bright mass of colour
attracts it irresistibly, as the candle-light attracts the eye of a
child a few weeks old. It sets off towards the patch of red or yellow,
probably not knowing beforehand that this is the visible symbol of food
for it, but merely guided by the blind habit of its race, imprinted
with binding force in the very constitution of its body. Thus the
moths, which fly by night and visit only white flowers whose corollas
still shine out in the twilight, are so irresistibly led on by the
external stimulus of light from a candle falling upon their eyes that
they cannot choose but move their wings rapidly in that direction; and
though singed and blinded twice or three times by the flame, must still
wheel and eddy into it, till at last they perish in the scorching
blaze. Their instincts, or, to put it more clearly, their simple
nervous mechanism, though admirably adapted to their natural
circumstances, cannot be equally adapted to such artificial objects as
wax candles. The butterfly in like manner is attracted automatically by
the colour of his proper flowers, and settling upon them, sucks up
their honey instinctively. But feeding is not now his only object in
life: he has to find and pair with a suitable mate. That, indeed, is
the great end of his winged existence. Here, again, his simple nervous
system stands him in good stead. The picture of his kind is, as it
were, imprinted on his little brain, and he knows his own mates the
moment he sees them, just as intuitively as he knows the flowers upon
which he must feed. Now we see the reason for the butterfly's large
optic centres: they have to guide it in all its movements. In like
manner, and by a like mechanism, the female butterfly or moth selects
the right spot for laying her eggs, which of course depends entirely
upon the nature of the young caterpillars' proper food. Each great
group of insects has its own habits in this respect, may-flies laying
their eggs on the water, many beetles on wood, flies on decaying animal
matter, and butterflies mostly on special plants. Thus throughout its
whole life the butterfly's activity is entirely governed by a rigid
law, registered and fixed for ever in the constitution of its ganglia
and motor nerves. Certain definite objects outside it invariably
produce certain definite movements on the insect's part. No doubt it is
vaguely conscious of all that it does: no doubt it derives a faint
pleasure from due exercise of all its vital functions, and a faint pain
when they are injured or thwarted; but on the whole its range of action
is narrowed and bounded by its hereditary instincts and their nervous
correlatives. It may light on one flower rather than another; it may
choose a fresher and brighter mate rather than a battered and dingy
one; but its little subjectivity is a mere shadow compared with ours,
and it hardly deserves to be considered as more than a semi-conscious
automatic machine.




XVI.

_BUTTERFLY AESTHETICS._


The other day, when I was watching that little red-spotted butterfly
whose psychology I found so interesting, I hardly took enough account,
perhaps, of the insect's own subjective feelings of pleasure and pain.
The first great point to understand about these minute creatures is
that they are, after all, mainly pieces of automatic mechanism: the
second great point is to understand that they are probably something
more than that as well. To-day I have found another exactly similar
butterfly, and I am going to work out with myself the other half of the
problem about him. Granted that the insect is, viewed intellectually, a
cunning bit of nervous machinery, may it not be true at the same time
that he is, viewed emotionally, a faint copy of ourselves?

Here he stands on a purple thistle again, true, as usual, to the plant
on which I last found him. There can be no doubt that he distinguishes
one colour from another, for you can artificially attract him by
putting a piece of purple paper on a green leaf, just as the flower
naturally attracts him with its native hue. Numerous observations and
experiments have proved with all but absolute certainty that his
discrimination of colour is essentially identical with our own; and I
think, if we run our eye up and down nature, observing how universally
all animals are attracted by pure and bright colours, we can hardly
doubt that he appreciates and admires colour as well as discriminates
it. Mr. Darwin certainly judges that butterflies can show an aesthetic
preference of the sort, for he sets down their own lovely hues to the
constant sexual selection of the handsomest mates. We must not,
however, take too human a measure of their capacities in this respect.
It is sufficient to believe that the insect derives some direct
enjoyment from the stimulation of pure colour, and is hereditarily
attracted by it wherever it may show itself. This pleasure draws it on,
on the one hand, towards the gay flowers which form its natural food;
and, on the other hand, towards its own brilliant mates. Imprinted on
its nervous system is a certain blank form answering to its own
specific type; and when the object corresponding to this blank form
occurs in its neighbourhood, the insect blindly obeys its hereditary
instinct. But out of two or three such possible mates it naturally
selects that which is most brightly spotted, and in other ways most
perfectly fulfils the specific ideal. We need not suppose that the
insect is conscious of making a selection or of the reasons which guide
it in its choice: it is enough to believe that it follows the strongest
stimulus, just as the child picks out the biggest and reddest apple
from a row of ten. Yet such unconscious selections, made from time to
time in generation after generation, have sufficed to produce at last
all the beautiful spots and metallic eyelets of our loveliest English
or tropical butterflies. Insects always accustomed to exercising their
colour-sense upon flowers and mates, may easily acquire a high standard
of taste in that direction, while still remaining comparatively in a
low stage as regards their intellectual condition. But the fact I wish
especially to emphasise is this--that the flowers produced by the
colour-sense of butterflies and their allies are just those objects
which we ourselves consider most lovely in nature; and that the marks
and shades upon their own wings, produced by the long selective action
of their mates, are just the things which we ourselves consider most
beautiful in the animal world. In this respect, then, there seems to be
a close community of taste and feeling between the butterfly and
ourselves.

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

But sight is not the only important sense to the butterfly. He is
largely moved and guided by smell as well. Both bees and butterflies
seem largely to select the flowers they visit by means of smell, though
colour also aids them greatly. When we remember that in ants scent
alone does duty instead of eyes, ears, or any other sense, it would
hardly be possible to doubt that other allied insects possessed the
same faculty in a high degree; and, as Dr. Bastian says, there seems
good reason for believing that all the higher insects are guided almost
as much by smell as by sight. Now it is noteworthy that most of those
flowers which lay themselves out to attract bees and butterflies are
not only  but sweetly scented; and it is to this cause that we
owe the perfumes of the rose, the lily-of-the-valley, the heliotrope,
the jasmine, the violet, and the stephanotis. Night-flowering plants,
which depend entirely for their fertilisation upon moths, are almost
always white, and have usually very powerful perfumes. Is it not a
striking fact that these various scents are exactly those which human
beings most admire, and which they artificially extract for essences?
Here, again, we see that the aesthetic tastes of butterflies and men
decidedly agree; and that the thyme or lavender whose perfume pleases
the bee is the very thing which we ourselves choose to sweeten our
rooms.

Finally, if we look at the sense of taste, we find an equally curious
agreement between men and insects; for the honey which is stored by the
flower for the bee, and by the bee for its own use, is stolen and eaten
up by man instead. Hence, when I consider the general continuity of
nervous structure throughout the whole animal race, and the exact
similarity of the stimulus in each instance, I can hardly doubt that
the butterfly really enjoys life somewhat as we enjoy it, though far
less vividly. I cannot but think that he finds honey sweet, and
perfumes pleasant, and colour attractive; that he feels a lightsome
gladness as he flits in the sunshine from flower to flower, and that he
knows a faint thrill of pleasure at the sight of his chosen mate. Still
more is this belief forced upon me when I recollect that, so far as I
can judge, throughout the whole animal world, save only in a few
aberrant types, sugar is sweet to taste, and thyme to smell, and song
to hear, and sunshine to bask in. Therefore, on the whole, while I
admit that the butterfly is mainly an animated puppet, I must qualify
my opinion by adding that it is a puppet which, after its vague little
fashion, thinks and feels very much as we do.




XVII.

_THE ORIGIN OF WALNUTS._


Mr. Darwin has devoted no small portion of his valuable life to
tracing, in two bulky volumes, the Descent of Man. Yet I suppose it is
probable that in our narrow anthropinism we should have refused to
listen to him had he given us two volumes instead on the Descent of
Walnuts. Viewed as a question merely of biological science, the one
subject is just as important as the other. But the old Greek doctrine
that 'man is the measure of all things' is strong in us still. We form
for ourselves a sort of pre-Copernican universe, in which the world
occupies the central point of space, and man occupies the central point
of the world. What touches man interests us deeply: what concerns him
but slightly we pass over as of no consequence. Nevertheless, even the
origin and development of walnuts is a subject upon which we may
profitably reflect, not wholly without gratification and interest.

This kiln-dried walnut on my plate, which has suggested such abstract
cogitations to my mind, is shown by its very name to be a foreign
production; for the word contains the same root as Wales and Welsh, the
old Teutonic name for men of a different race, which the Germans still
apply to the Italians, and we ourselves to the last relics of the old
Keltic population in Southern Britain. It means 'the foreign nut,' and
it comes for the most part from the south of Europe. As a nut, it
represents a very different type of fruit from the strawberry and
raspberry, with their bright colours, sweet juices, and nutritious
pulp. Those fruits which alone bear the name in common parlance are
attractive in their object; the nuts are deterrent. An orange or a plum
is brightly tinted with hues which contrast strongly with the
surrounding foliage; its pleasant taste and soft pulp all advertise it
for the notice of birds or monkeys, as a means for assisting in the
dispersion of its seed. But a nut, on the contrary, is a fruit whose
actual seed contains an abundance of oils and other pleasant
food-stuffs, which must be carefully guarded against the depredations
of possible foes. In the plum or the orange we do not eat the seed
itself: we only eat the surrounding pulp. But in the walnut the part
which we utilise is the embryo plant itself; and so the walnut's great
object in life is to avoid being eaten. Accordingly, that part of the
fruit which in the plum is stored with sweet juices is, in the walnut,
filled with a bitter and very nauseous essence. We seldom see this
bitter covering in our over-civilised life, because it is, of course,
removed before the nuts come to table. The walnut has but a thin shell,
and is poorly protected in comparison with some of its relations, such
as the American butternut, which can only be cracked by a sharp blow
from a hammer--or even the hickory, whose hard covering has done more
to destroy the teeth of New Englanders than all other causes put
together, and New England teeth are universally admitted to be the very
worst in the world. Now, all nuts have to guard against squirrels and
birds; and therefore their peculiarities are exactly opposite to those
of succulent fruits. Instead of attracting attention by being brightly
, they are invariably green like the leaves while they remain
on the tree, and brown or dusky like the soil when they fall upon the
ground beneath; instead of being enclosed in sweet coats, they are
provided with bitter, acrid, or stinging husks; and, instead of being
soft in texture, they are surrounded by hard shells, like the coco-nut,
or have a perfectly solid kernel, like the vegetable ivory.

The origin of nuts is thus exactly the reverse side of the origin of
fruits. Certain seeds, richly stored with oils and starches for aiding
the growth of the young plant, are exposed to the attacks of squirrels,
monkeys, parrots, and other arboreal animals. The greater part of them
are eaten and completely destroyed by these their enemies, and so never
hand down their peculiarities to any descendants. But all fruits vary a
little in sweetness and bitterness, pulpy or stringy tendencies. Thus a
few among them happen to be protected from destruction by their
originally accidental possession of a bitter husk, a hard shell, or a
few awkward spines and bristles. These the monkeys and squirrels
reject; and they alone survive as the parents of future generations.
The more persistent and the hungrier their foes become, the less will a
small degree of bitterness or hardness serve to protect them. Hence,
from generation to generation, the bitterness and the hardness will go
on increasing, because only those nuts which are the nastiest and the
most difficult to crack will escape destruction from the teeth or bills
of the growing and pressing population of rodents and birds. The nut
which best survives on the average is that which is least conspicuous
in colour, has a rind of the most objectionable taste, and is enclosed
in the most solid shell. But the extent to which such precautions
become necessary will depend much upon the particular animals to whose
attacks the nuts of each country are exposed. The European walnut has
only to defy a few small woodland animals, who are sufficiently
deterred by its acrid husk; the American butter-nut has to withstand
the long teeth of much more formidable forestine rodents, whom it sets
at nought with its stony and wrinkled shell; and the tropical cocos and
Brazil nuts have to escape the monkey, who pounds them with stones, or
flings them with all his might from the tree-top so as to smash them in
their fall against the ground below.

Our own hazel-nut supplies an excellent illustration of the general
tactics adopted by the nuts at large. The little red tufted blossoms
which everybody knows so well in early spring are each surrounded by a
bunch of three bracts; and as the nut grows bigger, these bracts form a
green leaf-like covering, which causes it to look very much like the
ordinary foliage of the hazel-tree. Besides, they are thickly set with
small prickly hairs, which are extremely annoying to the fingers, and
must prove far more unpleasant to the delicate lips and noses of lower
animals. Just at present the nuts have reached this stage in our
copses; but as soon as autumn sets in, and the seeds are ripe, they
will turn brown, fall out of their withered investment, and easily
escape notice on the soil beneath, where the dead leaves will soon
cover them up in a mass of shrivelled brown, indistinguishable in shade
from the nuts themselves. Take, as an example of the more carefully
protected tropical kinds, the coco-nut. Growing on a very tall
palm-tree, it has to fall a considerable distance toward the earth; and
so it is wrapped round in a mass of loose knotted fibre, which breaks
the fall just as a lot of soft wool would do. Then, being a large nut,
fully stored with an abundance of meat, it offers special attractions
to animals, and consequently requires special means of defence.
Accordingly, its shell is extravagantly thick, only one small soft spot
being left at the blunter end, through which the young plant may push
its head. Once upon a time, to be sure, the coco-nut contained three
kernels, and had three such soft spots or holes; but now two of them
are aborted, and the two holes remain only in the form of hard scars.
The Brazil nut is even a better illustration. Probably few people know
that the irregular angular nuts which appear at dessert by that name
are originally contained inside a single round shell, where they fit
tightly together, and acquire their queer indefinite shapes by mutual
pressure. So the South American monkey has first to crack the thick
external common shell against a stone or otherwise; and, if he is
successful in this process, he must afterwards break the separate
sharp-edged inner nuts with his teeth--a performance which is always
painful and often ineffectual.

Yet it is curious that nuts and fruits are really produced by the very
slightest variations on a common type, so much so that the technical
botanist does not recognise the popular distinction between them at
all. In his eyes, the walnut and the coco-nut are not nuts, but
'drupaceous fruits,' just like the plum and the cherry. All four alike
contain a kernel within, a hard shell outside it, and a fibrous mass
outside that again, bounded by a thin external layer. Only, while in
the plum and cherry this fibrous mass becomes succulent and fills with
sugary juice, in the walnut its juice is bitter, and in the coco-nut it
has no juice at all, but remains a mere matted layer of dry fibres. And
while the thin external skin becomes purple in the plum and red in the
cherry as the fruits ripen, it remains green and brown in the walnut
and coco-nut all their time. Nevertheless, Darwinism shows us both here
and elsewhere that the popular distinction answers to a real difference
of origin and function. When a seed-vessel, whatever its botanical
structure, survives by dint of attracting animals, it always acquires a
bright- envelope and a sweet pulp; while it usually possesses a
hard seed-shell, and often infuses bitter essences into its kernel. On
the other hand, when a seed-vessel survives by escaping the notice of
animals, it generally has a sweet and pleasant kernel, which it
protects by a hard shell and an inconspicuous and nauseous envelope. If
the kernel itself is bitter, as with the horse-chestnut, the need for
disguise and external protection is much lessened. But the best
illustration of all is seen in the West Indian cashew-nut, which is
what Alice in Wonderland would have called a portmanteau seed-vessel--a
fruit and a nut rolled into one. In this curious case, the stalk swells
out into a bright- and juicy mass, looking something like a
pear, but of course containing no seeds; while the nut grows out from
its end, secured from intrusion by a covering with a pungent juice,
which burns and blisters the skin at a touch. No animal except man can
ever successfully tackle the cashew-nut itself; but by eating the
pear-like stalk other animals ultimately aid in distributing the seed.
The cashew thus vicariously sacrifices its fruit-stem for the sake of
preserving its nut.

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




XVIII.

_A PRETTY LAND-SHELL._


The heavy rains which have done so much harm to the standing corn have
at least had the effect of making the country look greener and lovelier
than I have seen it look for many seasons. There is now a fresh verdure
about the upland pastures and pine woods which almost reminds one of
the deep valleys of the Bernese Oberland in early spring. Last year's
continuous wet weather gave the trees and grass a miserable draggled
appearance; but this summer's rain, coming after a dry spring, has
brought out all the foliage in unwonted luxuriance; and everybody
(except the British farmer) agrees that we have never seen the country
look more beautiful. Though the year is now so far advanced, the trees
are still as green as in springtide; and the meadows, with their rich
aftermath springing up apace, look almost as lush and fresh as they did
in early June. Londoners who get away to the country or the seaside
this month will enjoy an unexpected treat in seeing the fields as they
ought to be seen a couple of months sooner in the season.

Here, on the edge of the down, where I have come up to get a good
blowing from the clear south-west breeze, I have just sat down to rest
myself awhile and to admire the view, and have reverted for a moment to
my old habit of snail-hunting. Years ago, when evolution was an
infant--an infant much troubled by the complaints inseparable from
infancy, but still a sturdy and vigorous child, destined to outlive and
outgrow its early attacks--I used to collect slugs and snails, from an
evolutionist standpoint, and put their remains into a cabinet; and to
this day I seldom go out for a walk without a few pill-boxes in my
pocket, in case I should happen to hit upon any remarkable specimen.
Now here in the tall moss which straggles over an old heap of stones I
have this moment lighted upon a beautifully marked shell of our
prettiest English snail. How beautiful it is I could hardly make you
believe, unless I had you here and could show it to you; for most
people only know the two or three ugly brown or banded snails that prey
upon their cabbages and lettuces, and have no notion of the lovely
shells to be found by hunting among English copses and under the dead
leaves of Scotch hill-sides. This cyclostoma, however,--I _must_
trouble you with a Latin name for once--is so remarkably pretty, with
its graceful elongated spiral whorls, and its delicately chiselled
fretwork tracery, that even naturalists (who have perhaps, on the
whole, less sense of beauty than any class of men I know) have
recognised its loveliness by giving it the specific epithet of
_elegans_. It is big enough for anybody to notice it, being about the
size of a periwinkle; and its exquisite stippled chasing is strongly
marked enough to be perfectly visible to the naked eye. But besides its
beauty, the cyclostoma has a strong claim upon our attention because of
its curious history.

Long ago, in the infantile days of evolutionism, I often wondered why
people made collections on such an irrational plan. They always try to
get what they call the most typical specimens, and reject all those
which are doubtful or intermediate. Hence the dogma of the fixity of
species becomes all the more firmly settled in their minds, because
they never attend to the existing links which still so largely bridge
over the artificial gaps created by our nomenclature between kind and
kind. I went to work on the opposite plan, collecting all those
aberrant individuals which most diverged from the specific type. In
this way I managed to make some series so continuous that one might
pass over specimens of three or four different kinds, arranged in rows,
without ever being able to say quite clearly, by the eye alone, where
one group ended and the next group began. Among the snails such an
arrangement is peculiarly easy; for some of the species are very
indefinite, and the varieties are numerous under each species. Nothing
can give one so good a notion of the plasticity of organic forms as
such a method. The endless varieties and intermediate links which exist
amongst dogs is the nearest example to it with which ordinary observers
are familiar.

But the cyclostoma is a snail which introduces one to still deeper
questions. It belongs in all our scientific classifications to the
group of lung-breathing mollusks, like the common garden snail. Yet it
has one remarkable peculiarity: it possesses an operculum, or door to
its shell, like that of the periwinkle. This operculum represents among
the univalves the under-shell of the oyster or other bivalves; but it
has completely disappeared in most land and fresh-water snails, as well
as among many marine species. The fact of its occurrence in the
cyclostoma would thus be quite inexplicable if we were compelled to
regard it as a descendant of the other lung-breathing mollusks. So far
as I know, all naturalists have till lately always so regarded it; but
there can be very little doubt, with the new light cast upon the
question by Darwinism, that they are wrong. There exists in all our
ponds and rivers another snail, not breathing by means of lungs, but
provided with gills, known as paludina. This paludina has a door to its
shell, like the cyclostoma; and so, indeed, have all its allies. Now,
strange as it sounds to say so, it is pretty certain that we must
really class this lung-breathing cyclostoma among the gill-breathers,
because of its close resemblance to the paludina. It is, in fact, one
of these gill-breathing pond-snails which has taken to living on dry
land, and so has acquired the habit of producing lungs. All molluscan
lungs are very simple: they consist merely of a small sac or hollow
behind the head, lined with blood-vessels; and every now and then the
snail opens this sac, allowing the air to get in and out by natural
change, exactly as when we air a room by opening the windows. So
primitive a mechanism as this could be easily acquired by any
soft-bodied animal like a snail. Besides, we have many intermediate
links between the pond-snails and my cyclostoma here. There are some
species which live in moist moss, or the beds of trickling streams.
There are others which go further from the water, and spend their days
in damp grass. And there are yet others which have taken to a wholly
terrestrial existence in woods or meadows and under heaps of stones.
All of them agree with the pond-snails in having an operculum, and so
differ from the ordinary land and river snails, the mouths of whose
shells are quite unprotected. Thus land-nails have two separate
origins--one large group (including the garden-snail) being derived
from the common fresh-water mollusks, while another much smaller group
(including the cyclostoma) is derived from the operculated pond-snails.

How is it, then, that naturalists had so long overlooked this
distinction? Simply because their artificial classification is based
entirely upon the nature of the breathing apparatus. But, as Mr.
Wallace has well pointed out, obvious and important functional
differences are of far less value in tracing relationship than
insignificant and unimportant structural details. Any water-snail may
have to take to a terrestrial life if the ponds in which it lives are
liable to dry up during warm weather. Those individuals alone will then
survive which display a tendency to oxygenise their blood by some
rudimentary form of lung. Hence the possession of lungs is not the mark
of a real genealogical class, but a mere necessary result of a
terrestrial existence. On the other hand, the possession of an
operculum, unimportant as it may be to the life of the animal, is a
good test of relationship by descent. All snails which take to living
on land, whatever their original form, will acquire lungs: but an
operculated snail will retain its operculum, and so bear witness to its
ancestry; while a snail which is not operculated will of course show no
tendency to develop such a structure, and so will equally give a true
testimony as to its origin. In short, the less functionally useful any
organ is, the higher is its value as a gauge of its owner's pedigree,
like a Bourbon nose or an Austrian lip.




XIX.

_DOGS AND MASTERS._


Probably the most forlorn and abject creature to be seen on the face of
the earth is a masterless dog. Slouching and slinking along, cringing
to every human being it chances to meet, running away with its tail
between its legs from smaller dogs whom under other circumstances it
would accost with a gruff who-the-dickens-are-you sort of growl,--it
forms the very picture of utter humiliation and self-abasement. Grip
and I have just come across such a lost specimen of stray doghood,
trying to find his way back to his home across the fields--I fancy he
belongs to a travelling show which left the village yesterday--and it
is quite refreshing to watch the air of superior wisdom and calm but
mute compassionateness with which Grip casts his eye sidelong upon that
wretched masterless vagrant, and passes him by without even a nod. He
looks up to me complacently as he trots along by my side, and seems to
say with his eye, 'Poor fellow! he's lost his master, you
know--careless dog that he is!' I believe the lesson has had a good
moral effect upon Grip's own conduct, too; for he has now spent ten
whole minutes well within my sight, and has resisted the most tempting
solicitations to ratting and rabbiting held out by half-a-dozen holes
and burrows in the hedge-wall as we go along.

This total dependence of dogs upon a master is a very interesting
example of the growth of inherited instincts. The original dog, who was
a wolf or something very like it, could not have had any such
artificial feeling. He was an independent, self-reliant animal, quite
well able to look after himself on the boundless plains of Central
Europe or High Asia. But at least as early as the days of the Danish
shell-mounds, perhaps thousands of years earlier, man had learned to
tame the dog and to employ him as a friend or servant for his own
purposes. Those dogs which best served the ends of man were preserved
and increased; those which followed too much their own original
instincts were destroyed or at least discouraged. The savage hunter
would be very apt to fling his stone axe at the skull of a hound which
tried to eat the game he had brought down with his flint-tipped arrow,
instead of retrieving it: he would be most likely to keep carefully and
feed well on the refuse of his own meals the hound which aided him most
in surprising, killing, and securing his quarry. Thus there sprang up
between man and the dog a mutual and ever increasing sympathy which on
the part of the dependent creature has at last become organised into an
inherited instinct. If we could only thread the labyrinth of a dog's
brain, we should find somewhere in it a group of correlated
nerve-connections answering to this universal habit of his race; and
the group in question would be quite without any analogous mechanism in
the brain of the ancestral wolf. As truly as the wing of the bird is
adapted to its congenital instinct of flying, as truly as the nervous
system of the bee is adapted to its congenital instinct of honeycomb
building, just so truly is the brain of the dog adapted to its now
congenital instinct of following and obeying a master. The habit of
attaching itself to a particular human being is nowadays engrained in
the nerves of the modern dog just as really, though not quite so
deeply, as the habit of running or biting is engrained in its bones and
muscles. Every dog is born into the world with a certain inherited
structure of limbs, sense-organs, and brain: and this inherited
structure governs all its future actions, both bodily and mental. It
seeks a master because it is endowed with master-seeking brain organs;
it is dissatisfied until it finds one, because its native functions can
have free play in no other way. Among a few dogs, like those of
Constantinople, the instinct may have died out by disuse, as the eyes
of cave animals have atrophied for want of light; but when a dog has
once been brought up from puppyhood under a master, the instinct is
fully and freely developed, and the masterless condition is thenceforth
for him a thwarting and disappointing of all his natural feelings and
affections.

Not only have dogs as a class acquired a special instinct with regard
to humanity generally, but particular breeds of dogs have acquired
particular instincts with regard to certain individual acts. Nobody
doubts that the muscles of a greyhound are specially correlated to the
acts of running and leaping; or that the muscles of a bull-dog are
specially correlated to the act of fighting. The whole external form of
these creatures has been modified by man's selective action for a
deliberate purpose: we breed, as we say, from the dog with the best
points. But besides being able to modify the visible and outer
structure of the animal, we are also able to modify, by indirect
indications, the hidden and inner structure of the brain. We choose the
best ratter among our terriers, the best pointer, retriever, or setter
among other breeds, to become the parents of our future stock. We thus
half unconsciously select particular types of nervous system in
preference to others. Once upon a time we used even to rear a race of
dogs with a strange instinct for turning the spit in our kitchens; and
to this day the Cubans rear blood-hounds with a natural taste for
hunting down the trail of runaway <DW64>s. Now, everybody knows that
you cannot teach one sort of dog the kind of tricks which come by
instinct to a different sort. No amount of instruction will induce a
well-bred terrier to retrieve your handkerchief: he insists upon
worrying it instead. So no amount of instruction will induce a
well-bred retriever to worry a rat: he brings it gingerly to your feet,
as if it was a dead partridge. The reason is obvious, because no one
would breed from a retriever which worried or from a terrier which
treated its natural prey as if it were a stick. Thus the brain of each
kind is hereditarily supplied with certain nervous connections wanting
in the brain of other kinds. We need no more doubt the reality of the
material distinction in the brain than we need doubt it in the limbs
and jaws of the greyhound and the bull-dog. Those who have watched
closely the different races of men can hardly hesitate to believe that
something analogous exists in our own case. While the highest types
are, as Mr. Herbert Spencer well puts it, to some extent 'organically
moral' and structurally intelligent, the lowest types are congenitally
deficient. A European child learns to read almost by nature (for
Dogberry was essentially right after all), while a <DW64> child learns
to read by painful personal experience. And savages brought to Europe
and 'civilised' for years often return at last with joy to their native
home, cast off their clothes and their outer veneering, and take once
more to the only life for which their nervous organisation naturally
fits them. 'What is bred in the bone,' says the wise old proverb, 'will
out in the blood.'




XX.

_BLACKCOCK._


Just at the present moment the poor black grouse are generally having a
hot time of it. After their quiet spring and summer they suddenly find
their heath-clad wastes invaded by a strange epidemic of men, dogs, and
hideous shooting implements; and being as yet but young and
inexperienced, they are falling victims by the thousand to their
youthful habit of clinging closely for protection to the treacherous
reed-beds. A little later in the season, those of them that survive
will have learned more wary ways: they will pack among the juniper
thickets, and become as cautious on the approach of perfidious man as
their cunning cousins, the red grouse of the Scottish moors. But so far
youthful innocence prevails; no sentinels as yet are set to watch for
the distant gleam of metal, and no foreshadowing of man's evil intent
disturbs their minds as they feed in fancied security upon the dry
seeds of the marsh plants in their favourite sedges.

The great families of the pheasants and partridges, in which the
blackcock must be included, may be roughly divided into two main
divisions so far as regards their appearance and general habits. The
first class consists of splendidly  and conspicuous birds, such
as the peacock, the golden pheasant, and the tragopan; and these are,
almost without exception, originally jungle-birds of tropical or
sub-tropical lands, though a few of them have been acclimatised or
domesticated in temperate countries. They live in regions where they
have few natural enemies, and where they are little exposed to the
attacks of man. Most of them feed more or less upon fruits and
bright- food-stuffs, and they are probably every one of them
polygamous in their habits. Thus we can hardly doubt that the male
birds, which alone possess the brilliant plumage of their kind, owe
their beauty to the selective preference of their mates; and that the
taste thus displayed has been aroused by their relation to their
specially gay and bright natural surroundings. The most lovely species
of pheasants are found among the forests of the Himalayas and the Malay
Archipelago, with their gorgeous fruits and flowers and their exquisite
insects. Even in England our naturalised Oriental pheasants still
delight in feeding upon blackberries, sloes, haws, and the pretty fruit
of the honeysuckle and the holly; while our dingier partridges and
grouse subsist rather upon heather, grain, and small seeds. Since there
must always be originally nearly as many cocks as hens in each brood,
it will follow that only the handsomest or most attractive in the
polygamous species will succeed in attracting to them a harem; and as
beauty and strength usually go hand in hand, they will also be the
conquerors in those battles which are universal with all polygamists in
the animal world. Thus we account for the striking and conspicuous
difference between the peacock and the peahen, or between the two sexes
in the pheasant, the turkey, and the domestic fowl.

On the other hand, the second class consists of those birds which are
exposed to the hostility of many wild animals, and more especially of
man. These kinds, typified by the red grouse, partridges, quails, and
guinea-fowls, are generally dingy in hue, with a tendency to
pepper-and-salt in their plumage; and they usually display very little
difference between the sexes, both cocks and hens being  and
feathered much alike. In short, they are protectively designed, while
the first class are attractive. Their plumage resembles as nearly as
possible the ground on which they sit or the covert in which they
skulk. They are thus enabled to escape the notice of their natural
enemies, the birds of prey, from whose ravages they suffer far more in
a state of nature than from any other cause. We may take the ptarmigans
as the most typical example of this class of birds; for in summer their
zigzagged black-and-brown attire harmonises admirably with the patches
of faded heath and soil upon the mountain-side, as every sportsman well
knows; while in the winter their pure white plumage can scarcely be
distinguished from the snow in which they lie huddled and crouching
during the colder months. Even in the brilliant species, Mr. Darwin and
Mr. Wallace have pointed out that the ornamental colours and crest are
never handed down to female descendants when the habits of nesting are
such that the mothers would be exposed to danger by their
conspicuousness during incubation. Speaking broadly, only those female
birds which build in hollow trees or make covered nests have bright
hues at all equal to those of the males. A female bird nesting in the
open would be cut off if it showed any tendency to reproduce the
brilliant colouring of its male relations.

Now the blackcock occupies to some extent an intermediate position
between these two types of pheasant life, though it inclines on the
whole to that first described. It is a polygamous bird, and it differs
most conspicuously in plumage from its consort, the grey-hen, as may be
seen from the very names by which they are each familiarly known. Yet,
though the blackcock is handsome enough and shows evident marks of
selective preference on the part of his ancestral hens, this preference
has not exerted itself largely in the direction of bright colour, and
that for two reasons. In the first place the blackcock does not feed
upon brilliant foodstuffs, but upon small bog-berries, hard seeds, and
young shoots of heather, and it is probable that an aesthetic taste for
pure and dazzling hues is almost confined to those creatures which,
like butterflies, hummingbirds, and parrots, seek their livelihood
amongst beautiful fruits or flowers. In the second place, red, yellow,
or orange ornaments would render the blackcock too conspicuous a mark
for the hawk, the falcon, or the weapons of man; for we must remember
that only those blackcocks survive from year to year and hand down
their peculiarities to descendants which succeed in evading the talons
of birds of prey or the small-shot of sportsmen. Feeding as they do on
the open, they are not protected, like jungle-birds, by the shade of
trees. Thus any bird which showed any marked tendency to develop
brighter or more conspicuous plumage would almost infallibly fall a
victim to one or other of his many foes; and however much his beauty
might possibly charm his mates (supposing them for the moment to
possess a taste for colour), he would have no chance of transmitting it
to a future generation. Accordingly, the decoration of the blackcock is
confined to glossy plumage and a few ornamental tail-feathers. The
grey-hen herself still retains the dull and imitative colouring of the
grouse race generally; and as for the cocks, even if a fair percentage
of them is annually cut off through their comparative conspicuousness
as marks, their loss is less felt than it would be in a monogamous
community. Every spring the blackcock hold a sort of assembly or court
of love, at which the pairing for the year takes place. The cocks
resort to certain open and recognised spots, and there invite the
grey-hens by their calls, a little duelling going on meanwhile. During
these meetings they show off their beauty with great emulation, after
the fashion with which we are all familiar in the case of the peacock;
and when they have gained the approbation of their mates and maimed or
driven away their rivals, they retire with their respective families.
Unfortunately, like most polygamists, they make bad fathers, leaving
the care of their young almost entirely to the hens. According to the
veracious account of Artemus Ward, the great Brigham Young himself
pathetically descanted upon the difficulty of extending his parental
affections to 131 children. The imperious blackcock seems to labour
under the same sentimental disadvantage.




XXI.

_BINDWEED._


Not the least beautiful among our native wild flowers are many of those
which grow, too often unheeded, along the wayside of every country
road. The hedge-bordered highway on which I am walking to-day, to take
my letters to the village post, is bordered on either side with such a
profusion of colour as one may never see equalled during many years'
experience of tropical or sub-tropical lands. Jamaica and Ceylon could
produce nothing so brilliant as this tangled mass of gorse, and
thistle, and St. John's-wort, and centaury, intermingled with the lithe
and whitening sprays of half-opened clematis. And here, on the very
edge of the road, half-smothered in its grey dust, I have picked a
pretty little convolvulus blossom, with a fly buried head-foremost in
its pink bell; and I am carrying them both along with me as I go, for
contemplation and study. For this little flower, the lesser bindweed,
is rich in hints as to the strange ways in which Nature decks herself
with so much waste loveliness, whose meaning can only be fully read by
the eyes of man, the latest comer among her children. The old school of
thinkers imagined that beauty was given to flowers and insects for the
sake of man alone: it would not, perhaps, be too much to say that, if
the new school be right, the beauty is not in the flowers and insects
themselves at all, but is read into them by the fancy of the human
race. To the butterfly the world is a little beautiful; to the
farm-labourer it is only a trifle more beautiful: but to the cultivated
man or the artist it is lovely in every cloud and shadow, in every tiny
blossom and passing bird.

The outer face of the bindweed, the exterior of the cup, so to speak,
is prettily marked with five dark russet-red bands, between which the
remainder of the corolla is a pale pinky-white in hue. Nothing could be
simpler and prettier than this alternation of dark and light belts; but
how is it produced? Merely thus. The convolvulus blossom in the bud is
twisted or contorted round and round, part of the cup being folded
inside, while the five joints of the corolla are folded outside, much
after the fashion of an umbrella when rolled up. And just as the bits
of the umbrella which are exposed when it is folded become faded in
colour, so the bits of the bindweed blossom which are outermost in the
bud become more deeply oxidised than the other parts, and acquire a
russet-red hue. The belted appearance which thus results is really as
accidental, if I may use that unphilosophical expression, as the belted
appearance of the old umbrella, or the wrinkles caused by the waves on
the sea-sands. The flower happened to be folded so, and got ,
or discoloured, accordingly. But when a man comes to look at it, he
recognises in the alternation of colours and the symmetrical
arrangement one of those elements of beauty with which he is familiar
in the handicraft of his own kind. He reads an intention into this
result of natural causes, and personifies Nature as though she worked
with an aesthetic design in view, just as a decorative artist works when
he similarly alternates colours or arranges symmetrical and radial
figures on a cup or other piece of human pottery. The beauty is not in
the flower itself; it is in the eye which sees and the brain which
recognises the intellectual order and perfection of the work.

I turn the bindweed blossom mouth upward, and there I see that these
russet marks, though paler on the inner surface, still show faintly
through the pinky-white corolla. This produces an effect not unlike
that of a delicate shell cameo, with its dainty gradations of
semi-transparent white and interfusing pink. But the inner effect can
be no more designed with an eye to beauty than the outer one was; and
the very terms in which I think of it clearly show that my sense of its
loveliness is largely derived from comparison with human handicraft. A
farmer would see in the convolvulus nothing but a useless weed; a
cultivated eye sees in it just as much as its nature permits it to see.
I look closer, and observe that there are also thin lines running from
the circumference to the centre, midway between the dark belts. These
lines, which add greatly to the beauty of the flower, by marking it out
into zones, are also due to the folding in the bud; they are the inner
angles of the folds, just as the dark belts are the overlapping edges
of the outer angles. But, in addition to the minor beauty of these
little details, there is the general beauty of the cup as a whole,
which also calls for explanation. Its shape is as graceful as that of
any Greek or Etruscan vase, as swelling and as simply beautiful as any
beaker. Can I account for these peculiarities on mere natural grounds
as well as for the others? I somehow fancy I can.

The bindweed is descended from some earlier ancestors which had five
separate petals, instead of a single fused and circular cup. But in the
convolvulus family, as in many others, these five petals have joined
into a continuous rim or bowl, and the marks on the blossom where it
was folded in the bud still answer to the five petals. In many plants
you can see the pointed edges of the former distinct flower-rays as
five projections, though their lower parts have coalesced into a
bell-shaped or tubular blossom, as in the common harebell. How this
comes to pass we can easily understand if we watch an unopened fuchsia;
for there the four bright- sepals remain joined together till
the bud is ready to open, and then split along a line marked out from
the very first. In the plastic bud condition it is very easy for parts
usually separate so to grow out in union with one another. I do not
mean that separate pieces actually grow together, but that pieces which
usually grow distinct sometimes grow united from the very first. Now,
four or five petals, radially arranged, in themselves produce that kind
of symmetry which man, with his intellectual love for order and
definite patterns, always finds beautiful. But the symmetry in the
flower simply results from the fact that a single whorl of leaves has
grown into this particular shape, while the outer and inner whorls have
grown into other shapes; and every such whorl always and necessarily
presents us with an example of the kind of symmetry which we so much
admire. Again, when the petals forming a whorl coalesce, they must, of
course, produce a more or less regular circle. If the points of the
petals remain as projections, then we get a circle with vandyked edges,
as in the lily of the valley; if they do not project, then we get a
simple circular rim, as in the bindweed. All the lovely shapes of
bell-blossoms are simply due to the natural coalescence of four, five,
or six petals; and this coalescence is again due to an increased
certainty of fertilisation secured for the plant by the better
adaptation to insect visits. Similarly, we know that the colours of the
corolla have been acquired as a means of rendering the flower
conspicuous to the eyes of bees or butterflies; and the hues which so
prove attractive to insects are of the same sort which arouse
pleasurable stimulation in our own nerves. Thus the whole loveliness of
flowers is in the last resort dependent upon all kinds of accidental
causes--causes, that is to say, into which the deliberate design of the
production of beautiful effects did not enter as a distinct factor.
Those parts of nature which are of such a sort as to arouse in us
certain feelings we call beautiful; and those parts which are of such a
sort as to arouse in us the opposite feelings we call ugly. But the
beauty and the ugliness are not parts of the things; they are merely
human modes of regarding some among their attributes. Wherever in
nature we find pure colour, symmetrical form, and intricate variety of
pattern, we imagine to ourselves that nature designs the object to be
beautiful. When we trace these peculiarities to their origin, however,
we find that each of them owes its occurrence to some special fact in
the history of the object; and we are forced to conclude that the
notion of intentional design has been read into it by human analogies.
All nature is beautiful, and most beautiful for those in whom the sense
of beauty is most highly developed; but it is not beautiful at all
except to those whose own eyes and emotions are fitted to perceive its
beauty.




XXII.

_ON CORNISH CLIFFS._


I am lying on my back in the sunshine, close to the edge of a great
broken precipice, beside a clambering Cornish fishing village. In front
of me is the sea, bluer than I have seen it since last I lay in like
fashion a few months ago on the schistose <DW72>s of the Maurettes at
Hyeres, and looked away across the plain to the unrippled Mediterranean
and the Stoechades of the old Phocaean merchant-men. On either hand rise
dark cliffs of hornblende and serpentine, weathered above by wind and
rain, and smoothed below by the ceaseless dashing of the winter waves.
Up to the limit of the breakers the hard rock is polished like Egyptian
syenite; but beyond that point it is fissured by disintegration and
richly covered with a dappled coat of grey and yellow lichen. The slow
action of the water, always beating against the solid wall of
crystalline rock, has eaten out a thousand such little bays all along
this coast, each bounded by long headlands, whose points have been worn
into fantastic pinnacles, or severed from the main mass as precipitous
islets, the favourite resting-place of gulls and cormorants. No grander
coast scenery can be found anywhere in the southern half of Great
Britain.

Yet when I turn inland I see that all this beauty has been produced by
the mere interaction of the sea and the barren moors of the interior.
Nothing could be flatter or more desolate than the country whose
seaward escarpment gives rise to these romantic coves and pyramidal
rocky islets. It stretches away for miles in a level upland waste, only
redeemed from complete barrenness by the low straggling bushes of the
dwarf furze, whose golden blossom is now interspersed with purple
patches of ling or the paler pink flowers of the Cornish heath. Here,
then, I can see beauty in nature actually beginning to be. I can trace
the origin of all these little bays from small rills which have worn
themselves gorge-like valleys through the hard igneous rock, or else
from fissures finally giving rise to sea-caves, like the one into which
I rowed this morning for my early swim. The waves penetrate for a
couple of hundred yards into the bowels of the rock, hemmed in by walls
and roof of dark serpentine, with its interlacing veins of green and
red bearing witness still to its once molten condition; and at length
in most cases they produce a blow-hole at the top, communicating with
the open air above, either because the fissure there crops up to the
surface, or else through the agency of percolation. At last, the roof
falls in; the boulders are carried away by the waves; and we get a long
and narrow cove, still bounded on either side by tall cliffs, whose
summits the air and rainfall slowly wear away into jagged and exquisite
shapes. Yet in all this we see nothing but the natural play of cause
and effect; we attribute the beauty of the scene merely to the
accidental result of inevitable laws; we feel no necessity for calling
in the aid of any underlying aesthetic intention on the part of the sea,
or the rock, or the creeping lichen, in order to account for the
loveliness which we find in the finished picture. The winds and the
waves carved the coast into these varied shapes by force of blind
currents working on hidden veins of harder or softer crystal: and we
happen to find the result beautiful, just as we happen to find the
inland level dull and ugly. The endless variety of the one charms us,
while the unbroken monotony of the other wearies and repels us.

Here on the cliff I pick up a pretty fern and a blossoming head of the
autumn squill--though so sweet a flower deserves a better name. This
fern, too, is lovely in its way, with its branching leaflets and its
rich glossy-green hue. Yet it owes its shape just as truly to the
balance of external and internal forces acting upon it as does the
Cornish coast-line. How comes it then that in the one case we
instinctively regard the beauty as accidental, while in the other we
set it down to a deliberate aesthetic intent? I think because, in the
first case, we can actually see the forces at work, while in the second
they are so minute and so gradual in their action as to escape the
notice of all but trained observers. This fern grows in the shape that
I see, because its ancestors have been slowly moulded into such a form
by the whole group of circumstances directly or indirectly affecting
them in all their past life; and the germ of the complex form thus
produced was impressed by the parent plant upon the spore from which
this individual fern took its birth. Over yonder I see a great
dock-leaf; it grows tall and rank above all other plants, and is able
to spread itself boldly to the light on every side. It has abundance of
sunshine as a motive-power of growth, and abundance of air from which
to extract the carbon that it needs. Hence it and all its ancestors
have spread their leaves equally on every side, and formed large flat
undivided blades. Leaves such as these are common enough; but nobody
thinks of calling them pretty. Their want of minute subdivision, their
monotonous outline, their dull surface, all make them ugly in our eyes,
just as the flatness of the Cornish plain makes it also ugly to us.
Where symmetry is slightly marked and variety wanting, as in the
cabbage leaf, the mullein, and the burdock, we see little or nothing to
admire. On the other hand, ferns generally grow in hedge-rows or
thickets, where sunlight is much interrupted by other plants, and where
air is scanty, most of its carbon being extracted by neighbouring
plants which leave but little for one another's needs. Hence you may
notice that most plants growing under such circumstances have leaves
minutely sub-divided, so as to catch such stray gleams of sunlight and
such floating particles of carbonic acid as happen to pass their way.
Look into the next tangled and overgrown hedge-row which you happen to
pass, and you will see that almost all its leaves are of this
character; and when they are otherwise the anomaly usually admits of an
easy explanation. Of course the shapes of plants are mostly due to
their normal and usual circumstances, and are comparatively little
influenced by the accidental surroundings of individuals; and so, when
a fern of such a sort happens to grow like this one on the open, it
still retains the form impressed upon it by the life of its ancestors.
Now, it is the striking combination of symmetry and variety in the
fern, together with vivid green colouring, which makes us admire it so
much. Not only is the frond as a whole symmetrical, but each frondlet
and each division of the frondlet is separately symmetrical as well.
This delicate minuteness of workmanship, as we call it, reminds us of
similar human products--of fine lace, of delicate tracery, of skilful
filagree or engraving. Almost all the green leaves which we admire are
noticeable, more or less, for the same effects, as in the case of
maple, parsley, horse-chestnut, and vine. It is true, mere glossy
greenness may, and often does, make up for the want of variety, as we
see in the arum, holly, laurel, and hart's-tongue fern; but the leaves
which we admire most of all are those which, like maidenhair, are both
exquisitely green and delicately designed in shape. So that, in the
last resort, the beauty of leaves, like the beauty of coast scenery, is
really due to the constant interaction of a vast number of natural
laws, not to any distinct aesthetic intention on the part of Nature.

On the other hand, the pretty pink squill reminds me that
semi-conscious aesthetic design in animals has something to do with the
production of beauty in nature--at least, in a few cases. Just as a
flower garden has been intentionally produced by man, so flowers have
been unconsciously produced by insects. As a rule, all bright red,
blue, or orange in nature (except in the rare case of gems) is due to
animal selection, either of flowers, fruits, or mates. Thus we may say
that beauty in the inorganic world is always accidental; but in the
organic world it is sometimes accidental and sometimes designed. A
waterfall is a mere result of geological and geographical causes, but a
bluebell or a butterfly is partly the result of a more or less
deliberate aesthetic choice.


    LONDON: PRINTED BY
    SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
    AND PARLIAMENT STREET




_January, 1881._

[Illustration]

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Parts I. to XIV. now ready, 21_s._ each.

  ~Cussans' History of Hertfordshire.~
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[asterism] _Parts XV. and XVI., completing the work, are just ready._

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Two Vols., demy 4to, handsomely bound in half-morocco, gilt, profusely
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      Military--from the Earliest Period in England to the reign of
      George the Third. Including Notices of Contemporaneous Fashions
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The Volumes may also be had _separately_ (each Complete in itself)
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    Vol. I. ~THE DICTIONARY.~
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Also in 25 Parts, at 5_s._ each. Cases for binding, 5_s._
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    "_A comprehensive and highly valuable book of reference.... We
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    "_A most readable and interesting work--and it can scarcely be
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  1. ~Fletcher's (Giles, B.D.) Complete Poems:~
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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, with Illustrations, 4_s._ 6_d._

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_NEW NOVEL BY JUSTIN McCARTHY._

  ~Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1881~,
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      SCIENCE NOTES, by W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS, F.R.A.S., will also be
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[asterism] _Now ready, the Volume for_ JULY _to_ DECEMBER, _1880,
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_THE RUSKIN GRIMM._--Squire 8vo, cloth extra, 6_s._ 6_d._; gilt edges,
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  ~German Popular Stories.~
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Post 8vo. cloth limp, 2_s._ 6_d._

  ~Glenny's A Year's Work in Garden and Greenhouse:~
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New and Cheaper Edition, demy 8vo, cloth extra, with Illustrations,
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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt, with Illustrations, 7_s._ 6_d._

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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt, with Illustrations, 7_s._ 6_d._

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Square 16mo (Tauchnitz size), cloth extra, 2_s._ per volume.

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      Both Series Complete in One Vol.

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      T. M'CRIE, D.D.

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Crown 8vo, cloth gilt and gilt edges, 7_s._ 6_d._

  ~Golden Treasury of Thought, The:~
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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt, with Illustrations, 4_s._ 6_d._

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  ~Hake (Dr. Thomas Gordon), Poems by:~

      ~Maiden Ecstasy.~ Small 4to, cloth extra, 8_s._

      ~New Symbols.~ Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6_s._

      ~Legends of the Morrow.~ Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6_s._


Medium 8vo, cloth extra, gilt, with Illustrations, 7_s._ 6_d._

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Post 8vo, cloth extra, 4_s._ 6_d._; a few large-paper copies,
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  ~Handwriting, The Philosophy of.~
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  ~Haweis (Mrs.), Works by:~

  ~The Art of Dress.~
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      By Mrs. H. R. HAWEIS, Author of "Chaucer for Children."
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[asterism] _See also_ CHAUCER, _pp. 5 and 6 of this Catalogue._


Complete in Four Vols., demy 8vo, cloth extra, 12_s._ each.

  ~History Of Our Own Times~,
      from the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election
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Crown 8vo. cloth extra, 5_s._

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Crown 8vo, cloth limp, with Illustrations, 2_s._ 6_d._

  ~Holmes's The Science of Voice Production and Voice
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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt, 7_s._ 6_d._

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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt, 7_s._ 6_d._

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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 7_s._

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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 7_s._ 6_d._

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Demy 8vo, cloth extra, 12_s._ 6_d._

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      A History of Provencal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages.
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Two Vols. 8vo, with 52 Illustrations and Maps, cloth extra, gilt, 14_s._

  ~Josephus, The Complete Works of.~
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A NEW EDITION, Revised and partly Re-written, with several New
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Small 8vo, cloth, full gilt, gilt edges, with Illustrations, 6_s._

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Fcap. 8vo, illustrated boards.

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    [_In the press._


Crown 8vo, illustrated boards, with numerous Plates, 2_s._ 6_d._

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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, with numerous Illustrations, 10_s._ 6_d._

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Small 8vo, cloth extra, 5_s._

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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt, with Portraits, 7_s._ 6_d._

  ~Lamb's Complete Works~,
      In Prose and Verse, reprinted from the Original Editions, with
      many Pieces hitherto unpublished. Edited, with Notes and
      Introduction, by R. H. SHEPHERD. With Two Portraits and
      Facsimile of a Page of the "Essay on Roast Pig."

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Demy 8vo, cloth extra, with Maps and Illustrations, 18_s._

  ~Lamont's Yachting in the Arctic Seas~;
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    important addition made to our Arctic literature for a long
    time._"---ATHENAEUM.


Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6_s._

  ~Lares and Penates~;
      or, The Background of Life. By FLORENCE CADDY.


Crown 8vo, cloth, full gilt, 7_s._ 6_d._

  ~Latter-Day Lyrics:~
      Poems of Sentiment and Reflection by Living Writers; selected
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Crown 8vo, cloth, full gilt, 6_s._

  ~Leigh's A Town Garland.~
      By HENRY S. LEIGH, Author of "Carols of Cockayne."

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Second Edition.--Crown 8vo, cloth extra, with Illustrations, 6_s._

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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, with Illustrations, 7_s._ 6_d._

  ~Life in London~;
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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6_s._

  ~Lights on the Way:~
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Crown 8vo, cloth extra, with Illustrations, 7_s._ 6_d._

  ~Longfellow's Complete Prose Works.~
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  ~My Little Girl.~ By the same.

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  ~The Cure of Souls.~ By MACLAREN CORBAN.

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  ~The Dead Secret.~ By the same.

  ~My Miscellanies.~ By the same.

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  ~Man and Wife.~ By the same.

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  ~The Frozen Deep.~ By the same.

  ~The Law and the Lady.~ By WILKIE COLLINS.

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  ~What will the World Say?~ By Charles Gibbon.

  ~In Love and War.~ By CHARLES GIBBON.

  ~For the King.~ By CHARLES GIBBON.

  ~In Honour Bound.~ By CHAS. GIBBON.

  ~Dick Temple.~ By JAMES GREENWOOD.

  ~Under the Greenwood Tree.~ By THOMAS HARDY.

  ~An Heiress of Red Dog.~ By BRET HARTE.

  ~The Luck of Roaring Camp.~ By BRET HARTE.

  ~Gabriel Conroy.~ By BRET HARTE.

  ~Fated to be Free.~ By JEAN INGELOW.

  ~Confidence.~ By HENRY JAMES, Jun.

  ~The Queen of Connaught.~ By HARRIETT JAY.

  ~The Dark Colleen.~ By the same.

  ~Number Seventeen.~ By HENRY KINGSLEY.

  ~Oakshott Castle.~ By the same.

  ~Patricia Kemball.~ By E. LYNN LINTON.

  ~The Atonement of Leam Dundas.~ By E. LYNN LINTON.

  ~The World Well Lost.~ By E. LYNN LINTON.

  ~The Waterdale Neighbours.~ By JUSTIN MCCARTHY.

  ~My Enemy's Daughter.~ Do.

  ~Linley Rochford.~ By the same.

  ~A Fair Saxon.~ By the same.

  ~Dear Lady Disdain.~ By the same.

  ~Miss Misanthrope.~ By JUSTIN MCCARTHY.

  ~Lost Rose.~ By KATHARINE S. MACQUOID.

  ~The Evil Eye.~ By the same.

  ~Open! Sesame!~ By FLORENCE MARRYAT.

  ~Whiteladies.~ By Mrs. OLIPHANT.

  ~Held in Bondage.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Strathmore.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Chandos.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Under Two Flags.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Idalia.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Cecil Castlemaine.~ By Ouida.

  ~Tricotrin.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Puck.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Folle Farine.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Dog of Flanders.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Pascarel.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Two Little Wooden Shoes.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Signa.~ By OUIDA.

  ~In a Winter City.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Ariadne.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Friendship.~ By OUIDA.

  ~Fallen Fortunes.~ By J. PAYN.

  ~Halves.~ By JAMES PAYN.

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  ~By Proxy.~ By JAMES PAYN.

  ~Less Black than We're Painted.~ By JAMES PAYN.

  ~The Best of Husbands.~ Do.

  ~Walter's Word.~ By J. PAYN.

  ~The Mystery of Marie Roget.~ By EDGAR A. POE.

  ~Her Mother's Darling.~ By Mrs. J. H. RIDDELL.

  ~Gaslight and Daylight.~ By GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

  ~Bound to the Wheel.~ By JOHN SAUNDERS.

  ~Guy Waterman.~ By J. SAUNDERS.

  ~One Against the World.~ By JOHN SAUNDERS.

  ~The Lion in the Path.~ By JOHN and KATHERINE SAUNDERS.

  ~Tales for the Marines.~ By WALTER THORNBURY.

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  ~Adventures of Tom Sawyer.~ By MARK TWAIN.

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End of Project Gutenberg's The Evolutionist at Large, by Grant Allen

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