It will be seen from the above remarks and from all the pages that follow, that I stand a long way off from those mystics who declare, with Mr Aldous Huxley in his Perennial Philosophy, that it is only ‘in imageless contemplation that the soul comes to knowledge of reality’. My position is at the side of the contemporary Indian seer, Sri Aurobindo, who claims that ‘the touch of Earth is always invigorating to the son of earth, even when he seeks a supra-physical knowledge’. And he adds that perhaps the metaphysical can only be really mastered in its fullness ‘when we keep our feet firmly on the physical’. I could not agree more. We are really lost if we fail to make these connections. There is nothing new about it; but today our minds should be freer to make the synthesis than when the great mystic Jakob Boehme wrote – ‘View this world diligently and consider what manner of fruits, sprouts, and branches grow out of the Salitter of the earth, from trees, plants, herbs, roots, flowers, oil, wine, corn, and whatever else there is that thy heart can find out; all is a type of the heavenly pomp.’
Such is the trend of this volume. Nevertheless I have written up to no system – I hope. In setting out on my discoveries I have never aimed to say anything particular, and often have been well content to let the facts speak for themselves. When imagination has stirred and the same thought has flowered on several occasions from different stems, I have been glad to repeat myself, and thus support the view from more than one angle. Consequently there is a considerable degree of subjectivity even in Part One of this book. I can scarcely apologize for the very thing that gives me the necessary heat to pursue my studies and which is in fact my particular contribution. I must leave it to others to popularize science, they do it more thoroughly, and that is not my aim. In Part Two, when dealing with trees and forestry, my method is still more subjective and reflective. The inquiry called for a technique less taut than in Part One, for a slower pace, and an approach somewhat similar to that of While Following the Plough.
A word with regard to Authority. If I used jargon I could afford to be inaccurate, since no one could be quite sure what I had said. Since I like to make things clear, I have been careful to acquire my facts with all the thoroughness and conscientiousness of an ignorant man. This does not mean that sometimes I have not been compelled to choose between two schools of thought, or that the absolutely up-to-date finding is necessarily on my page. I can only claim that I have said nothing without authority, and indeed it will be obvious that many of the facts are too fantastic to have been invented. But when I have felt that a reference was called for, I have given it.
JOHN STEWART COLLIS
PART ONE
DOWN TO EARTH
1 The Potato
I AM ANXIOUS to say a word about the potato. But will the Muse fail me? We sing the flower, we sing the leaf: we seldom sing the seed, the root, the tuber. Indeed the potato enters literature with no very marked success. True, William Cobbett abused it, and Lord Byron made it interesting by rhyming it with Plato; but for the most part it enters politics more easily and has done more to divide England from Ireland than Cromwell himself.
Yet if we praise the potato we praise ourselves, for it is an extreme example of artificiality. ‘The Earth, in order that she might urge us to labour, the supreme law of life,’ says Fabre, ‘has been but a harsh stepmother. For the nestling bird she provides abundant food; to us she offers only the fruit of the Bramble and the Blackthorn.’ Not everyone realizes this, he said. Some people even imagine that the grape is today just like that from which Noah obtained the juice that made him drunk; that the cauliflower, merely with the idea of being pleasant, has of its own accord evolved its creamy-white head; that turnips and carrots, being keenly interested in human affairs, have always of their own motion done their best for man; and that the potato, since the world was young, wishing to please us, has gone through its curious performance. The truth is far otherwise. They were all uneatable at first: it is we who have forced them to become what they now are. ‘In its native countries,’ says Fabre, ‘on the mountains of Chili and Peru, the Potato, in its wild state, is a meagre tubercle, about the size of a Hazelnut. Man extends the hospitality of his garden to this sorry weed; he plants it in nourishing soil, tends it, waters it, and makes it fruitful with the sweat of his brow. And there from year to year, the Potato thrives and prospers; it gains in size and nourishing properties, finally becoming a farinaceous tuber the size of our two fists.’
During my first year in the agricultural world I decided to have a good look at the potato and carefully watch its operations. I had never done this before. In fact I had little idea how potatoes actually arrive. With me it is always a question of either knowing a thing or not knowing it, of knowing it from A to Z or not at all; the man who knows a little about everything, from A to B, is incomprehensible to me. Thus I could approach the potato with the clear head of ignorance.
I took one in my hand and offered it my attention. It looked like a smooth stone; a shapeless shape; so dull in appearance that I found it hard to look at it without thinking of something else. I took a knife and cut it in two. It had white flesh extremely like an apple. But it had nothing in the middle, no seed-box, no seeds. How then can it produce more of itself? Well, the season had now come to put it down into the earth. So we planted them into the prepared field, at a distance of one foot from each other – plenty of space in which laboratory they could carry out any work they desired.
In about a fortnight’s time I decided to dig up one and see if anything had happened. The first I came to had not changed in appearance at all. From the second, however, two white objects, about the length of a worm, were protruding. On a human face, I reflected, such protuberances would have seemed like some dreadful disease. One of them looked like a little white mouse trying to get out. I covered up these phenomena again and left them to it, wondering what they would do next.
After a few weeks I again visited this earthly laboratory to see how things were getting on. I found that the protuberances had become much longer and had curled round at their ends – now white snakes coming out of the humble solid. They had curly heads like purplish knots, and some of these knots had half opened into a series of green ears. And now there was another addition: at the place where these stems, as we may now call them, came out of the potato, a network had been set up, of strings, as it were, connecting the outfit with the soil. These, the roots, went downwards seeking the darkness of the earth, while every stem rose up to seek the light. But as yet there was no indication where or how new potatoes could appear.
During these early weeks the surface of the field showed no sign that anything was going on underneath. Later the whole brown surface began to change into rows of green – the light-seeking stalks had risen into the air and unfurled their leaves. As the weeks passed, and the months, these little green bushes grew in size and complexity until in late July they were all flowering – and a very pretty field it then looked. As all flowers have fruit, so had these – potato fruits, of course. But not the ones we eat.
Even after the green rows had appeared above-board and I made a further examination below I still did not see where the crop of potatoes was going to come from. Eventually the problem cleared itself up. I found them forming at the end of the network of roots. A few of the roots began to swell at their extremity – first about the size of a bird’s egg, then a baby’s shoe, getting larger and larger until some of them were four times the size of the original potato planted in the ground. And here we come to the curious thing about potatoes. The substance which grows at the end of the root is not itself a root. It is a branch. It is not a root, the botanists say, because roots do not bear buds and do not bear leaves, while this, the potato, does have buds and does have leaves (in the shape of scales). It is a subterranean branch, swollen and misshapen, storing up food for its buds; and botanists, no longer having the courage to call it a branch, call it a tuber. So when we plant a potato we are not planting a seed, we are not planting a root; we are planting a
branch from whose gateways, called ‘eyes’, roots reach down and stalks reach up.
To complete the circle, what happens to the original potato? It conforms to the rule of eternal return by virtue of which the invisible becomes visible, and the visible takes on invisibility. It darkens, it softens, it becomes a squashy brown mash, and finally is seen no more. I used to enjoy taking it up in my hand when I saw it lying on the ground looking like an old leather purse. It had performed a remarkable act. Now its work was done. All the virtue had gone out of it. It had given its life to the green stalks above and the tubers below. Here I seemed to see a familiar sight in nature; many things coming from one thing, much from little, even something out of nothing. This is what we seem to see. Yet it is not so. True, the original potato started the business going, sending down those roots and sending up those stalks; but they in their turn built the building. The earth is not a solid; it is chiefly gas. The air is not thin; it is massed with food. Those roots sucked gases from the earth, those leaves sucked gases from the sky, and the result was the visible, hard, concrete potato. When we eat a potato we eat the earth, and we eat the sky. It is the law of Nature that all things are all things. That which does not appear to exist today is tomorrow hewn down and cast into the oven. Nature carries on by taking in her own washing. That is Nature’s economy, contrary to political economy; so that he who cries ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ is numbered amongst the infidels. ‘A mouse,’ said Walt Whitman, ‘is enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.’ Or a potato. What is an infidel? One who lacks faith. What creates faith? A miracle. How then can there be a faithless man found in the world? Because many men have cut off the nervous communication between the eye and the brain. In the madness of blindness they are at the mercy of intellectual nay-sayers, theorists, theologians, and other enemies of God. But it doesn’t matter; in spite of them, faith is reborn whenever anyone chooses to take a good look at anything – even a potato.
2 The Worm
I have heard it said more than once that the reason why there are now more wire-worms afflicting the crops than in the past is because there are more tractors. The idea being that since the tractor-driven plough turns over three or four furrows at a time as against the horse-plough’s one furrow, the result is that the birds get far fewer troughs in which to find worms. Thus more worms are left in the soil.
It is an attractive theory. There is something cheering in the knowledge that Nature always hits back. It is metaphysically inspiring, if physically discouraging. Everything in nature has a meaning and a purpose. Everything is necessary to the universal scheme, every germ, every microbe, every pest. When anything ceases to serve the harmony it dies out. When man threatens the harmony he is attacked in one way or another. Those who dislike the advent of tractors see the multiplication of the wire-worm as an example of Nature’s revenge.
Unfortunately there is a difficulty about this latter case. We cannot suppose that the seagulls and other birds who eat the worms are always agriculturally-minded. We cannot count on their patriotism in eating only wire-worms and leaving all the earth-worms. And if wire-worms do harm to the soil, earth-worms do a great deal of good. In so far as the birds have less chance to eat them we could argue with equal plausibility that the soil thereby gains by the tractor.
Eyeless, legless, faceless, earless, voiceless, the earth-worm is not much to look at – a mere squirming piece of flesh. Yet with its powerful muscles, its two stomachs (one inside and one outside), and its false teeth, it is able to carry out remarkable works.
These worms are the only creatures that eat the earth. They eat clay. They do not digest it neat like a piece of chocolate. As it passes through they extract from it organic matter in the shape of ova, larvae, spores of cryptogamic plants, and micrococci. That is the first reason why they swallow earth. They swallow it also in order to make their underground passages, their burrows – casting the material upwards into delicate little towers. This continuous mining has prodigious results. Charles Darwin estimated that fifty thousand worms often inhabit an acre of ground, and subsequent counts have put the figure at a million or more in rich soil. Since each worm ejects from twelve to twenty ounces a year, we find that from seven to eighteen tons of earth are frequently thrown up every year on an acre. Thus stones lying about on an uncultivated field will sink at the rate of two inches a year, so that in thirty years you can gallop a horse over what was once stony ground without its hoofs striking a single stone. Sometimes there are so many worms at work that a narrow stone path across a lawn will sink so quickly that a gardener cannot control it. Some of the slabs of Stonehenge have already gone down a good way, though it will take time before the rest of the ruins disappear from sight.
The worm is a friend to archaeologists who owe to it the preservation of many ancient objects. Coins, gold ornaments, stone implements are buried and stored for future inspection. Not long ago a neglected field near Shrewsbury which was ploughed up revealed arrow-heads used at the Battle of Shrewsbury. The war-time ploughing-up has brought to light many new objects – a bomb which fell near my neighbour’s house blew a Roman knife into his bedroom window. But that is only the minor museum-work of worms: villas, abbeys, pavements, walls, even towns have been carefully preserved by them. The remains of a large Roman villa at Chedworth, found under a wood by a gamekeeper digging for rabbits in 1877, with coins lying about dated aD 350; the tessellated pavement of Beaulieu Abbey; eighteen chambers of a Roman house at Brading in the Isle of Wight, with coins dated aD 337; the walls, tesserae, pottery, and coins of Roman Emperors from aD 133 to 361 dug up at Abinger marking another villa deserted fifteen hundred years ago; the town of Silchester with a wall eighteen feet high extending a mile and a half round a space of a hundred acres – all these, according to established authority, had been let down into the earth by the action of worms.
Another by-product of their activities consists in lowering the hills and widening the valleys of the land. Wherever there is a tumulus, an embankment, a hill, a slope, a valley which is not made of gravel or pure sand, worm castings will be thrown up, and then through the action of rain and wind their towers of earth will roll to the bottom so that gradually the mound is lessened. Small effects have vast results in the calendar of nature, and the eye that could keep watch across the passage of centuries might see the Sussex Downs and the Dorset slopes vanishing through the movement of worms.
Their general work is more ambitious. They create soil. Everyone knows that rock is really solid soil. When it becomes broken up and mixed with vegetable ash it is called clay. Worms, by means of acids and salts which they digestively generate, carry on a steady decomposition of rock. They go further; they wear down the small particles of rock which other agencies can do little to diminish, by grinding them in their gizzards with beads of glass and angular fragments of bricks or tiles which they employ as millstones or artificial teeth in order to crush the earth that they so largely consume. At the same time they add to the organic matter in the soil by the astonishing number of half-decayed leaves which they draw into their burrows to a depth of two or three inches. These leaves are moistened, torn into shreds, partially digested, and intimately mingled with earth – thus giving vegetable mould its uniform dark tint. This mould differs from subsoil by the absence of fragments and particles of stone which are larger than a worm can swallow.
It is pleasant to reflect when we look out upon an expanse of land with a fine superficial mould that it has all been swallowed by worms, that it has all passed and will pass again through the bodies of worms. For during the course of this journey the finer particles are sifted from the coarser, the whole mixed with vegetable debris, and saturated with intestinal secretions, so that the ground is prepared as by a gardener for the growth of fibrous-rooted plants and seedlings of all sorts. The soil is turned over and over, it is in perpetual motion. Thus the worms plough, and thus they harrow. They drain the land also; their burrows which often penetrate to a depth of five or six feet provide a vast drai
nage system. And yet another thing: they make way for aerial penetration, and they greatly facilitate the downward passage of moderate roots. They go further: they specially nourish those roots with the humus that lines their burrows like a cemented tunnel.
It would seem that before we proclaim that it is a bad thing for tractors to aid the preservation of wire-worms, we should consider whether it is not a good thing that they should aid the preservation of earth-worms. But it is possible that some people are uninstructed concerning this monarch among animals. I have not observed golfers flinch at the spectacle of thousands of dead worms on the fairway poisoned for their pleasure. Some people know nothing of the worm save that it ‘will turn’ under certain unspecified circumstances. Others, when they have cut one in half, honestly feel that they have performed an act of creation, making two creatures proceed where there had been only one before. There are no songs in its name. True, the poet who bent the most concentrated gaze upon the tiger, and saw that in it the fire of life burned brightest, was also he who, looking down into the damp, dark earth, perceived the worm and said – ‘Art thou a worm? Image of weakness, art thou but a worm? I see thee like an Infant wrapped in the Lily’s leaf.’ Yet even he may not have known that the worm is more powerful than the tiger, that by its vast operations in ploughing, in harrowing, in levelling, in draining, in airing, in manuring, and even in creating soil, it adds to the wealth of nations and governs the destiny of man; and that given time and condition it could remove a mountain and cause a city to vanish from the face of the earth.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 24
