by Grant Allen
The various kinds of grasses differ very little from one another in general plan; the flower in almost all is constructed strictly on the lines above mentioned; and the leaves in almost all are just the same soft pensile blades, making them into the proper green sward for open, unwooded, wind-swept plains. But like almost all other very dominant families, they have split up into an immense number of kinds, distinguished from one another by minute differences in the arrangement of the florets and the spikelets; and these kinds have again subdivided into more and more minutely different genera and species. One great group, with panicles of a loose character, and very degraded spikelets, has given origin to many southern grasses, from some of which the cultivated millets are derived. Another great group, with usually more spiky inflorescence, has given origin to most of our northern grasses, from some of which the common cereals are derived. This second group has again split up into several others, of which the important one for our present purpose is that of the Hordeineæ, or barley-worts. From one of the numerous genera into which the primitive Hordeineæ have once more split up, our cultivated barleys take their rise; from another, which here demands further attention, we get our cultivated wheats.
The nearest form to true wheat now found wild in the British Isles is the creeping couch-grass, a perennial closely agreeing in all essential particulars of structure with our cultivated annual wheats. But in the south European region we find in abundance a large series of common wild annual grasses, forming the genus Ægilops of technical botany, and exactly resembling true wheat in every point except the size of the grain. One species of this genus, Ægilops ovata, a small, hard, wiry annual, is now pretty generally recognised among botanists as the parent of our cultivated corn. There was a good reason, indeed, why primitive man, when he first began to select and rudely till a few seeds for his own use, should have specially affected the grass tribe. No other family of plants has seeds richer in starches and glutens, as indeed might naturally be expected from the extreme diminution in the number of seeds to each flower. On the other hand, the flowers on each plant are peculiarly numerous; so that we get the combined advantages of many seeds, and rich seeds, so seldom to be found elsewhere except among the pulse family. The experiments conducted by the Agricultural Society in their College Garden at Cirencester have also shown that careful selection will produce large and rich seeds from Ægilops ovata, considerably resembling true wheat, after only a few years’ cultivation
Primitive man, of course, did not proceed nearly so fast as that. Of the very earliest attempts at cultivation of Ægilops, all traces are now lost, but we can gather that its tillage must have continued in some unknown western Asiatic region for some time before the neolithic period; for in that period we find a rude early form of wheat already considerably developed among the scanty relics of the Swiss lake dwellings. The other cultivated plants by which it is there accompanied, and the nature of the garden weeds which had followed in its wake, point back to Central or Western Asia as the land in which its tillage had first begun. From that region the Swiss lake dwellers brought it with them to their new home among the Alpine valleys. It differed much already from the wild Ægilops in size and stature; but at the same time it was far from having attained the stately dimensions of our modern corn. The ears found in the lake dwellings are shorter and narrower than our own; the spikelets stand out more horizontally, and the grains are hardly more than half the size of their modern descendants. The same thing is true in analogous ways with all the cultivated fruits or seeds of the stone age: they are invariably much smaller and poorer than their representatives in existing fields or gardens. From that time to this the process of selection and amelioration has been constant and unbroken, until in our own day the descendants of these little degraded lilies, readapted to new functions under a fresh régime, have come to cover almost all the cultivable plains in all civilised countries, and supply by far the largest part of man’s food in Europe, Asia, America, and Australia.
VI. A MOUNTAIN TULIP.
The path up from the Llyn to the crest of Mynydd Mawr leads for some distance along the mossy, boulder-strewn course of a mountain torrent, which takes its rise in a fairy spring close below the actual summit of the craggy peak. It is a stiff pull for fair-weather pedestrians, this almost untrodden tourist trackway, with here and there a hand-and-knee clamber over great glacier-marked bosses of solid granite; but the exquisite glimpses we get at every fresh spur over the bare shoulders of Moel Siabod and into the cleft valley of the upper Conway more than compensate for the rough stony walking and the obvious damage to one’s nether integuments. Very few casual beaten-road visitors ever find out these lonely footpaths up the less-frequented mountains; the mass takes its circular tour round the regulation road by Llanberis, Beddgelert, and Capel Curig, leaving Mynydd Mawr and its neighbouring Carnedds out in the cool shade of popular neglect. So much the better for those wandering naturalists who love to ramble among unhackneyed scenes, and to spy out wild nature in all her native loveliness, an Artemis who only bares her beauty among the deepest and most secret recesses of glade or woodland.
Fig. 41. — Lloydia serotina
(Mountain Tulip).
Here by the bank of the tiny torrent, where I shall stop and rest on a smooth stretch of naked rock for a few idle minutes, there is beauty enough in all conscience to charm the spellbound eyes of any intrusive Actæon. The moist fissures of the water-worn granite are richly clad with filmy fronds of alpine ferns; the drier crevices among the tumbled rocks are tufted with the black stems and graceful foliage of the maidenhair spleenwort; and the scanty alluvial mould on the slopes beyond is carpeted by lithe creeping sprays of beautiful branching club-moss. All around me, a wealth of luxuriant mountain vegetation covers the peaty soil of the hollows, or the shallow granitic clay washed down into the crannies from the weathering crags above. There are insect-eating sundews, with their clammy red-haired leaves inclosing the half-digested bodies of a dozen tiny flies, whose attention they have falsely attracted with their delusive show of pretended honey. There are equally deceptive butterworts, with tall scapes of bright blue blossoms, and with pale yellowish-green foliage curled tightly round their mouldering victims in a deadly embrace. There are Alpine saxifrages, unfolding their pretty pinky-white flowers to the eager advances of the fertilising bees. And here amongst them all, in a sheltered nook of the inclosing granite débris, is the great prize of the day, the wee slender mountain tulip, in search of which I have come out this breezy morning, and whose actual home on the side of Mynydd I hardly expected to light upon so easily or so quickly in the upward march.
Of course I was told beforehand exactly where to look for it by the torrent’s brink; for our botanists have long ago so thoroughly overhauled every inch of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, in search of specimens, that every individual station for every rare British plant is perfectly well known to them, and printed in minute detail in half a dozen British floras. But I feared that here our little mountain tulip might be quite extinct already, exterminated by the too pressing attention of its numerous dilettante admirers; for as soon as your average collector finds a last lingering relic of some moribund British race on down or moorland, his first notion is to complete its destruction by rooting up the one remaining individual as a unique specimen, to become a permanent record of his luck and skill in the brown paper treasuries of his own herbarium. We, however, are naturalists of another kidney, I trust: we will observe and examine our little treasure carefully on the spot, but we will not pull it up ruthlessly, bulb and all, or press its pretty blossoms under a dead weight of books and drying paper, in order to preserve its miserable mummy in the wretched cemetery of a hortus siccus. Long may it flourish on its native hill-side, and may no scientific hand ever grub it up as the cruel trophy of a specimen-slaughtering raid! Indeed, to be perfectly frank, like the canny Scot who was ‘no thot sure of Jocky,’ I have not trusted even my readers themselves with the exact secret of my tulip’s whe
reabouts. I will confess that I have invented the name of Mynydd Mawr on purpose to deceive, and I have led up to the summit by a roundabout path through the glen of Conway in order to prevent any future intruder from retracing his steps without me, and annexing for his own private aggrandisement the pretty flower whose life I have so chivalrously and humanely spared. When we come to learn the history of its race, I feel sure every one will sympathise in the sentiment which makes me wish to preserve this solitary colony of Alpine flowers as long as possible from the desecrating hands of the abandoned plant-collector.
First, let us look exactly what manner of lily it really is, and then we will go on to unravel together the clues and tokens of its romantic history. See, it is a little simple grass-like plant, sending forth from its buried bulb two or three very slender blades by way of leaves; and from their midst springs a graceful bending stem, surmounted by a single star-shaped white blossom. At least, it looks white at first sight, though when you come to examine it more closely you can observe three red lines running down the face of each petal, and converging on a small bright golden spot at their base. Those lines are in fact honey-guides for the mountain insects, pointing them the shortest road to the sweets stored up in the nectaries, and so saving them any extra trouble in looking about for their morning’s meal. On the other hand, the insects repay the flower for its honey by carrying pollen from blossom to blossom, and so enabling the plant to set its seed. Of course, unless the young capsule in the centre of each blossom is thus fertilised by pollen from one of its neighbours, it never ripens into a seed-bearing fruit at all; and, indeed, in the economy of the plant itself, the sole object of the blossom, with its bright petals, its store of honey, and its faint perfume (almost imperceptible to any save very delicate senses), is simply to induce the bee or the butterfly thus to convey the fertilising powder from one head of flowers to another of the same sort.
Our little plant has of course a botanical name of the usual clumsy kind; but in this particular instance there is a certain rough fitness in its application, for being a Welsh lily by nature it is duly known by a Latinised Welsh name as Lloydia. Now, I am not going this morning to inquire fully into the whole past history of the original family from which it springs — that would be too long a subject for an off-hand lecture as I sit here basking on the bare granite slope; I propose only entering in any detail into the last chapter of its chequered career, and asking how it has managed to keep its foothold for so many ages in this one spot and on a few neighbouring Snowdonian summits. But before we go into that final question we must just begin, by way of preparatory exercise, with a very brief account of its earlier origin. Lloydia serotina, then, to give it the full benefit of its Latinised name, is a mountain plant of northern and Arctic Europe, as well as of the chillier portions of Siberia and British North America. Further south, it is found only in the colder upland shoulders of the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Altai range, as well as in a few other great snowy mountain systems; but in Britain it occurs nowhere except on one or two of the higher mountains here in North Wales. By origin, it is a very early and simple offshoot of the great lily tribe; one of the most primitive lilies, indeed, now existing on the face of the earth. Like all others of that vast family, it has six petals and six stamens or pollen-bearing sacs; but it still retains a very early form of lily flower in its open star-shaped blossom as well as in one or two other smaller peculiarities. The cultivated tulips of our gardens, varieties of a wild Levantine species, are all descended from a somewhat similar form; but with them the course of development has gone much further; the petals have grown far larger and more conspicuous, in order to allure the eyes of bigger southern insects, and the general form of the flower has become bell-shaped instead of star-shaped, in order to ensure more safe and certain fertilisation by these winged allies; for in a tubular blossom the pollen is much more likely to be brushed off from the insect’s head on to the proper portion of the unripe capsule than in an open spreading flower like our Lloydia here. Hence we may fairly say that Lloydia represents an early ancestral form from which the modern and more southerly tulips are nature’s enlarged and improved varieties.
But how did these pretty little white lilies get here, and why do they still remain here in their early simple form, while their southern sisters elsewhere have been slowly modified into brilliant yellow bell-shaped tulips? Thereby hangs a most curious and delightful tale. For I have very little doubt that the ancestors of our pretty lilies here have been growing uninterruptedly in the present spot for many thousands of years, and that during all that time they have gone on reproducing themselves by seed from time to time, without once having crossed their stock with any of their congeners in the Arctic regions or in the great snow-clad ranges of central Europe. Indeed, I very much doubt whether they have ever even intermarried with their neighbours on the other Snowdonian summits, for I think I shall be able to show good reasons for believing that each of these little isolated colonies has lived on for ages all by itself on each of their three scattered peaks in the North Welsh district.
It is a curious fact, certainly, that one should find a single species of Arctic flower reappearing at such long distances in such isolated spots under closely similar circumstances. If we go to the great snow-clad stretches of land which extend around the Arctic Circle in Europe, Asia, and America, we shall everywhere find our little lily growing in abundance close up to the line of perpetual snow, though its diverse habitats are there divided by wide expanses of open sea. If, again, we cross the whole of the German plains, we shall see no Lloydias in the intervening tract; but when we reach the Alps and the Pyrenees, we shall a second time come upon other isolated colonies of the self-same flower. Once more, we may turn eastward, and we shall meet with it, after a long march, among the Carpathians and the Caucasus; or we may turn westward, and then we shall light upon it again on the craggy sides of a few solitary Welsh mountains. How does it come that in every cold tract we find the self-same species recurring again and again wherever the circumstances are fitted for its growth? and how have its seeds or bulbs been conveyed across such wide stretches of intervening sea or valley to so many distinct and separate chilly regions?
One obvious answer might be, that under similar conditions a like flower had everywhere been developed from some common plant of lowland or temperate districts. But in reality such absolute similarity of independent development never actually occurs in nature, for the various Lloydias are not merely rather like one another, but are actually one and the same species, as like each other (to quote our old Welsh friend Fluellin) ‘as my fingers is to my fingers.’ Now, naturalists know that such absolute identity of structure can only arise through unbroken descent from a common origin; wherever two species are separately descended from unlike ancestors, however close their analogies may be, they are always at once marked off from one another by some very obvious points of structural dissimilarity. Nor can we suppose that the seeds of the Lloydia have been transported from one place to another by mere accident, clinging to the legs of Arctic birds, or carried unwittingly on the muddy heels of globe-trotting tourists. Such accidents do indeed occasionally occur, and they account for the very fragmentary manner in which remote Oceanic islands like the Azores or St. Helena are peopled by waifs and strays from the fauna and flora of all neighbouring continents. But as we have already seen in the converse case of the hairy spurge, it would be incredible that such an accident should have occurred over and over again in a hundred separate cases, so that every suitable place in the whole northern hemisphere should separately, by mere luck, have received a distinct colony of appropriate cold-climate plants. Incredible, I should say, even if the instance of the Lloydia stood alone without any analogues; but in fact, as I shall try to point out by-and-by, it is only one instance out of a thousand that might be quoted; for every Arctic land and every snow-clad Alpine peak is covered close up to the limit of vegetation with dozens or hundreds of similar plants, insects, and animals, which are no
where found in all the intervening temperate or lowland regions. Clearly all these coincidences cannot be due to mere accident; we must seek for their reason in some single and common fact.
See this great rounded block of smooth granite on whose solid shoulders I am now sitting; how wonderfully grooved and polished it is, with long, deep, rounded furrows running lengthwise across its face in the same direction as the general dip of the Conway valley. What can have made those curious parallel channels on its naked surface, I wonder? Any one who has ever looked closely at the rocks about the foot of a glacier in Switzerland will recognise at once what was the agency at work on the granite slopes of Mynydd Mawr. Those are most undoubtedly ice-marks, caused by the long, slow, grinding action of the superincumbent glaciers. For of course everybody knows nowadays that there was once a time when great glacial sheets spread over the combes and glens of Snowdonia, as they spread to-day over the nants of Chamounix and the buried basin of the Mer de Glace.
Dr. Croll’s calculations have shown that the astronomical conjunction necessary for the production of such a state of things must have occurred some two hundred thousand years since; and from that date down to eighty thousand years ago our planet kept presenting alternately either pole to the sun during long cycles of 10,500 years each; so that, first, the northern hemisphere enjoyed a long summer, while the southern was enveloped for a vast distance from the Antarctic Circle in a single covering sheet of ice; and then again the southern hemisphere had its lengthened spell of tropical weather, while the north was turned into one enormous Greenland down as far as the British Isles. Eighty thousand years ago, or thereabouts, this condition of things began to change; the climate of the north became more genial; and ever since that date our sober planet has oscillated within gentler limits, producing only such alternate results of annual summer and winter as those with which we ourselves are now familiar.
