The Worm Forgives the Plough

by John Stewart Collis

  In spite of the fact that the Brontosaurus and others used one brain at headquarters and another at hindquarters, it was yet too little. They could not adapt themselves permanently to the world. But their kingship lasted for what may have been close on ninety million years. We marvel, not at their ultimate extinction, but at the enormous length of their reign. All that time they roamed in the swamps and battled on the plains. They do not belong to history. There is no record of their wrongs. No human eyes saw them, no human mind was confronted by the riddle and the paradox of this clash of life with life for life’s sake. From the Jurassic to the end of the Cretacean day they were the highest beings, the boldest expression of Energy organized in earthly envelopes. Then they went down. These vessels perished. The soft garment of silence fell around their fate.

  Standing on my hill in Dorset in the pure clear air of the winter’s eve, while the clouds, unsanctified by history and living to tell no story, passed to their empty destination, I gazed upon the fossils in my hand, the books of stone, and sought to realize the actual existence of that monstrous age to which they joined me. The Dinosaurs did really exist, they did truly trample across the world for ninety million years; but when they passed from the surface of the earth and were seen no more, Man did not yet arise. Not for a long time; not in the Eocene, not in the Oligocene, not in the Miocene, not in the Pliocene, not for another hundred million years, in the Pleistocene, did earliest Homo appear.

  I tried to grasp this reality, this great fact of Time. I did not succeed. Once, in the middle of the Atlantic, looking at the horizon, I tried to imagine the space beyond it. For a second I had a true glimpse of that space, and of the space beyond that space. And perhaps for as much as a second now I saw the reality of a hundred million years, and realized how Man, having only had one million years at most, has only just begun his career. But this knowledge soon slipped from me and became merely intellectual. It did not remain organic with me, as is the fact of gravitation or the roundness of the earth. That is our general trouble. The findings of geology are too recent to be as yet incorporated in our consciousness. This weakens the sensibility of our thought. We can be weak in economics; we can be weak in human history; we can be weak in doctrine; we can be weak in literature; we can be weak in many branches of science – and no great harm be done. We must not be weak in anthropology. We must not be weak in geology. The old cosmologies have gone. And because they have gone men have lost faiths and beliefs. They are inclined to despair. There is no need to despair. The message of geology is so inspiring. Our hope and faith should be increased. Consider the main fact. Man has lived a million years: that is all. He may live another hundred million, perhaps a thousand million. We do not spontaneously think in these terms when we speak of posterity; we think of a few hundred years hence – of 2346, not of 22346 or 2222346. And when we think of the past we feel that the civilizations of Greece and of Rome were a long time ago. Yet in the eye of geology a thousand years hence is as tomorrow, and the age of Socrates as yesterday. These are necessary facts to incorporate into our daily consciousness. Then we should have patience. Then we should have room for hope. We should think sensibly. We should believe in progress – even that! Take our main fact again. A million years ago the ray of consciousness broke in on Man. He stood back, he saw, he became detached. That was a rudimentary ray. There is nothing more obvious than the evolution of our awareness. We are not wiser than Socrates. We are wiser than Neanderthal Man. We are not more ethically inclined than Confucius. We are more ethically inclined than Neanderthal Man. We are not more aesthetically developed than Shakespeare. We are more aesthetically developed than Neanderthal Man. If this is true, it is a tremendous truth: for if the aesthetic sense alone is developing it means that love and peace and beauty and worship and reverence are growing; This has grown – backslidings or not. Another million years will show as much difference again. We may call this faith – it is close to fact. Facts move us, they have much emotional effect, and these facts should inspire us. Our development is attended with sorrow, it is woven with tragedy, it is dedicated to perennial disasters – but it goes on, it does climb upwards. All the arts tell us this. Listen to the symphony! Are we not swept up into the windy mountain passes of the soul? Do we not hear the choir of angels that unspeakably proclaim the unwritten truth?

  7 The Unfolding of the Seed

  The corn is rising. The orchards are in bloom. Before the movement goes a step further I am determined to grasp in detail the process of the unfolding. This has gone on year after year around me, and I have admired the performance and paid lip-homage to the mystery of growth. The time has now come for me to follow the workings of the miracle. Anyone in the same state of mind is invited to join me.

  The seed – it must serve here as the exemplar of all seeds – arrives in the earth by the agency of man or nature. There it is, ready to start the great work. It is an envelope; or rather two envelopes, in which is confined – a new birth. We cannot see this living Principle. It is invisible. It never comes to light, it can never be touched, though it is the hardest of all facts. But we can see the machinery it employs; and having seen it we are satisfied, for we seek no more than the certainty of purpose and design. Within the envelopes are two storerooms (sometimes only one) containing food to start off with, which we call the cotyledons or perisperm – and this is the nearest we can get to the nascent embryo. At the base is a tiny prominence, the radicle, the beginning of the root. At the top, so incredibly packed that Nature would seem to make zero contain infinity, is a bundle of leaves. And somewhere betwixt and between is another minute prominence, the tigellus, from which the stem sprouts.

  Thus seeds are portable dormitories in which repose unborn generations, provided with food when they wake from their sleep. If no moisture gets near them they can remain in their cradles for years, even for centuries, still retaining their power to rise up. Seeds of the kidney bean have been known to sprout after sixty years of rest, while cornflower and raspberry seeds dug from the dry darkness of Celtic sepulchres have grown and flowered like seeds of yesterday.

  So we take a seed from its dry place and put it in the earth. If the soil is good various chemical agents therein will immediately begin to act upon the seed, chief of which is water. The moisture softens the envelopes and soaks into the embryo, and straightaway the hoarded provisions are set in motion. One of these rations is a substance called starch. As it stands it is no good, for water will not solve it, and an unliquefied substance cannot travel and penetrate. But there is another substance in the storeroom called diastase which, when water acts upon it, acts upon the starch, turning it into glucose in an excellent state of solution. It is this liquid which now sets the whole outfit in motion, digging and building, so that soon a root is sent down from the radicle and a stem up from the tigellus.

  They have most definite and determined natures, these two things, the root and the stem. One seeks the darkness, the other the light. We cannot alter their characters by interference. If we take a seed after the above process of germination has been set going, and twist it upside down so that the root points upwards and the stem downwards, then the root will turn in its course and descend, the stem will turn and ascend. Do this many times, and still the creatures (as we feel them to be) will not alter their determined direction, and will die rather than abandon their cause. Put an acorn in a vertical tube full of earth, let it germinate; let the root seek to explore the darkness and the stem steal up towards the sun – and then reverse the tube. Do it many times, and each time the root and stem will turn right round in their tracks.

  The composition of these vegetable parts is not simple like a shaft of steel. There is a complicated but very definite arrangement of fibres, tissues, veins, vessels, channels, and spiral threads all held in place by innumerable bricks called cells which are so small that a host could find comfortable lodging place on the point of a needle. They are much more than bricks and have many tasks. They are neither solid nor empty;
they are bags holding precious properties in a solution which, like blood, is thicker than water.

  The root, then, a porous membrane with the above composition, plunges down into the moist earth. It is not alive quite like an animal or part of an animal, not like a claw that grasps or a mouth that sucks – yet very nearly so. Water, which is a thin or weak solution, will always percolate through a porous membrane filled with a thicker solution – this in physics is called Endosmosis. It will also do another thing: it will go upwards, anti-gravitationwise, by a law of suction if it enters a tube so narrow as to be comparable to a hair; such a tube if placed in a pond will suck the water upwards higher than the level of the pond – this in physics is called Capillary Action. The tube need not be straight, it can be curved, it can be a dense complexity of channels, so dense as to seem like a lump of sugar or the wick of a lamp; yet the water or oil will, on entering a low portion of the sugar or wick, rise to the top. A root provides the conditions for the process of endosmosis and the action of capillarity, and as soon as it is in the moist earth it sucks up water by these two means.

  This water which rises upwards against gravitation is called the Ascending Sap.

  It is not pure water. For the food of plants must contain in solution some if not all of the following chemicals – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulphur, plus a modicum of potassium, calcium, iron, magnesium, and sodium. With the exception of carbon, roots can carry up any or all of these preparations from a good soil; and either through their own intelligence or someone else’s, they do gather up precisely these ingredients which they need, rejecting those which are useless or harmful. Yet on examination sap is found to be little more than pure water, the other quantities being incredibly minute in spite of their importance. Thus we may regard the roots as a colossal network of water-pipes and hoses pumping up tons of water from the soil. I say colossal network, for the aggregate of the ramifications of the roots belonging to one single average stalk of corn is said to be about a quarter of a mile. And I say tons of water, for an acre of corn will on average lift up two hundred and fifty tons a fortnight, while a single elm will in its season raise enough water to fill a tank thirty feet long, three feet deep, and three feet wide.

  And yet in spite of all this the plant is not getting enough to eat, and the food which it is getting is not adequately prepared to promote full growth. It cannot go on like this. The stored provisions and the soil’s contribution are enough to raise it above the earth; but that done, the part of the building above the ground must help. Brick buildings are built with hands: leaf buildings are built by the leaves themselves.

  Since the soil cannot supply all the nutriment, the atmosphere must make up the deficiency. You cannot make things out of thin air, people say. There is no such thing as thin air, if by that is meant something empty. It is really very thick and powerful, and from it all things are made that are made, or without it cannot be made, whether tree, plant, person, or army tank.

  What is the atmosphere? It is an air ocean. We walk at the bottom of an air ocean at a depth of from two hundred to five hundred miles. We cannot see it, we cannot touch it, and yet it presses down upon us with a pressure of a ton to every square foot. Each acre of land sustains forty-six thousand tons of air. It is possible to carry this surprising weight on our heads owing to the way it equalizes the pressure all around us. This atmosphere is composed, as everything is composed, of small items called molecules. They are not all of the same kind. Some contain oxygen, others carbon dioxide; some nitrogen, others argon; some ozone, others nitric acid; some water vapour, others ammonia. In quantity nitrogen heads the list and oxygen seconds it, while in importance the carbon dioxide is second to none. When we grasp that water, carbon, nitrogen, nitric acid, and ammonia contribute ninety per cent of all the materials that are built into the tissues of plants, it is easy to see how necessary it is that they should have roots in the air as well as roots in the soil.

  The leaves are these upper roots or mouths – plants are pretty well all mouth. Their first appearance in spring is in the form of knotty bundles, buds – looking like the claws of a dormouse on plum trees, as thin and sharp as toothpicks on beeches, and like half-buried beetles on the twigs of apple trees. In due course they change and open up and throw out what seems a new material altogether, as surprising as if tiny silk handkerchiefs began to grow from one’s fingernails; yet they are wood – thin, pliant, waving wood. The pressure behind this production is the Ascending Sap which, quietly but with great strength, slowly with unperturbed pace like the Hound of Heaven, advances throwing open the green fans. It receives some help from the sunshine, without which in any case nothing could be set in motion; but only when the leaves are fully open can we say that the plant is working from above as well as from below, that leaves are building leaves, and the bars of bough enshaded by their own exertions.

  The leaves appear on the twigs in so carefully planned an order that not one overshadows another. Each must get as much sunshine as possible, and their co-operation to this end is such that one leaf never gets in the light of another, but each aims by spiral arrangement at the goal of the greatest sunshine for the greatest number. As one side only is fitted to receive the rays with maximum advantage that side alone is turned towards the sun, and if deliberately twisted over by us, will turn round again with the same unfaltering determination as the root and the stem when treated in a similar manner.

  The surface of a leaf consists of a fine shred of stuff like green varnish, which is thus spread with a view to checking too swift an evaporation of moisture. This is the epidermis, consisting of cells each of which harbours two million globular corpuscles called chlorophyll whose green colouring is responsible for the verdant foliage around us, and whose work lays the foundations of the world. The whole epidermis is shot through with tiny holes smaller than the prick of a needle and numbering twenty-five thousand to a square centimetre. These are the stomata, doorways for entrance and exit: of entrance for the atmospheric effects; of exit for the ascending sap after it has deposited its cargo of chemical goods in the ante-chamber of the epidermis to await further instructions.

  The blade of the epidermis is supported by a girder called the petiole which rises from the twig. After it enters the blade of the leaf it sends out more ramifications called nervures, they themselves branching out into still more fibres until a beautiful scaffolding is set up. Their task is more than that of a scaffolding; they serve as corridors up which is channelled the ascending sap and down which flows the descending sap after the great operation in the parenchyma. This last consists of a certain tissue of cells in the epidermis which constitutes the supreme laboratory where labour is performed upon which rests the life of the world and the destiny of nations.

  Let us consider that labour. The primordial elements of all living things can be reduced to the basic materials of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen – or even more simply to carbon, air, and water. ‘Animals,’ says Fabre, ‘whether wolves or men, who are not wholly unlike wolves, both as regards food and other things as well, eat their carbon in combination, in the shape of mutton; while the sheep that gives us mutton absorbs its carbon in the form of grass . . . It is this wonderful transformation which enthrones a vegetable cell as monarch of the world, with men and wolves and sheep as its subjects.’

  How does the plant that builds up the flesh of sheep as the sheep goes to build up the flesh of man, consume its portion of carbon? It takes it in the raw. The digestion of its cell is such that it can take carbon neat. Everything living, every one of us must take carbon, for it is combustible, and if we do not burn we die. In order to keep alight our torch of life we breathe, that is we take in oxygen which burns the carbon which we have synthetically eaten – then we breathe out, we expel the oxygen in combination with the consumed carbon, and the gas is now carbon dioxide or carbon acid. It is a poison gas. We breathe in pure air: we breathe out poison gas at the rate of a hundred gallons a day. All a
nimals do likewise to a certain extent. The air might eventually become hopelessly vitiated and we would perish in our own poison were it not for the vegetable cell which feeds upon this gas, this deadly gas, and purifies the air for us. It is the chief and essential food of the plant, this poison; the cell, that astonishing stomach, exulting in the products of putrefaction, recreates life from the poisonous relics of death.

  The leaf, through its myriad mouths of stomata, breathes in this carbon acid gas, selecting it in preference to oxygen, absorbing it into the tissues of the cells, and conducting it into the laboratory where the labourers immediately set to work to break it up. By some incomprehensible means, under the influence of sunlight, they decompose, the composition separating the oxygen and at once sending it forth into the air again. It entered the orifices of the leaves as an unbreathable gas, it departs purged and changed into a life-giving elixir – a lily, for example, exhaling five hundred pints of oxygen in a summer’s day. It will return again with a fresh cargo of carbon to be again purified before once more resuming its aerial wanderings. We, the animals and man, by eating plants and eating ourselves, manufacture carbon dioxide, the poison gas that would choke us even if we used a gas-mask; they, the plants, gladly receive the poison as food and give us in exchange pure oxygen to breathe, while also treating the carbon in such a way that we can eat it.