Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

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 coloured, 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, wh
atever its botanical structure, survives by dint of attracting animals, it always acquires a bright-coloured 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-coloured 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.

  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 unimporta
nt 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.

  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.