by Grant Allen
A roundabout way, you think, to arrive, after all, at so simple a conclusion? Well, that is the habit of Nature. And again, bethink you, good, easy-going human being, how great are the difficulties she has to contend with, especially in the case of the plant creation. Put yourself in the orchid’s place, and you will see the reason. For remember how absolutely fixed and limited are plants, each rooted to the soil in a single small spot, each tied by strict conditions of rock, and water-supply, and air, and wind, and sun, and climate, from which none can escape, try they all their hardest. The opposite sides of a road are to them as the two poles, one with a sunny and southward-looking bank, the other with a cold and forbidding northern aspect; so that what flourishes apace on the first would shiver and die of chill winds on the second. Remember, too, that, save in the mildest degree, plants have no power of spontaneous or independent movement; they cannot stir from their birthplace, were it but for a single inch, nor move their own limbs save as the wind may sway them. Creatures thus narrowly and inevitably bound down must needs take advantage of the power of movement in all other kinds, wherever it will benefit them. Hence the use plants make of insects as common carriers of pollen; the use they make of birds as dispersers of seeds; the use they make of natural agencies, such as wind or stream, to waft winged thistle-down, to carry the parachutes of the dandelion and the willow, or to float the male blossoms of such water-weeds as vallisneria. Behold! I show you a mystery. The secret of the whole thing is that plants, being fixed themselves, must needs employ birds and insects as their Pickford vans — must rely on wind or stream for such casual services as wind or stream can easily afford them. Only in a few species can they effect anything like active movement for themselves, as one sees in the rooting runners of strawberries, or the wandering tubers of certain vagrant orchids, which spread far afield from last season’s nesting-place. These are clever devices for securing fresh virgin soil— “rotation of crops,” as the farmers put it.
XXV. THE ROOT OF THE MATTER.
Every Girton girl (vice Macaulay’s schoolboy, retired from overwork) — every Girton girl knows that a well-conducted British oak “spreads its roots as far and wide through the soil beneath as it rears its boughs above toward the air of heaven.” Every Girton girl is probably also of opinion that the British oak does this mainly or solely in order to fix itself by firm anchors in the soil — to withstand the battling winds and the constant pull of hostile gravitation. But what every Girton girl does not, perhaps, quite so confidently know is this — that, on the whole, the tips of the roots and the tips of the branches correspond roughly in situation with one another, so that if you were to unearth and expose the entire tree you would find it composed of two tolerably similar domes or hemispheres — one erect and aërial, and one inverted and earth-bound, each occupying approximately equal areas, and each circumscribed by fairly equal circles.
Why should this be so? It is clear enough, of course, that in order to fasten a big tree firmly in the ground, it must have numerous large and strong foundations. But wherefore this approximate equality in the areas occupied by roots and frondage? The answer is, because every large tree forms a sort of umbrella, a domed roof or catchment basin for the rain that falls upon it; and it has always its own peculiar and admirably adapted arrangement for conducting all the water it intercepts to certain special spots or drinking-places in the ground, where it sets the roots, and especially the rootlets, or absorbent terminals, intended to soak that water up and convey it to the branches. If you stand under an oak-tree during a summer shower — a mode of passive scientific observation for which nature has afforded quite ample opportunities during the last few weeks — you will notice at once that the round mass of its foliage acts exactly like a huge umbrella, and conducts all the rain that falls upon its surface outward and downward towards the circumference of the circle. The drops that alight upon the central and tallest part of the tree are shed by the veined and channelled leaves till they fall off the tips on to the layer immediately below and outside them; this layer again conveys them to the next in order, and so on, till at last a little gathering stream drips from the ends of the lowest and longest outward-pointing boughs on to the soil beneath them. The ground in the centre remains perfectly dry, while a circle at the circumference is hollowed into a sort of irregular trench, or rude round of tiny pits, by the continuous dripping of the collected gutters.
Now, of course, the plant wants to utilize to the utmost all the rain it thus intercepts. It would be quite too silly of it to produce rootlets and absorbent terminals in the dry central space covered by the dense umbrella of foliage. But all around the circumference, and especially at the spots just under the runnels, where the water drops from the ends of the boughs, exactly as it drops from the rib-points of the silk-and-steel umbrella, the tree develops numerous minute rootlets, which suck up the rain as fast as it falls, and convey it by fixed pipes to the leaves and growing-points. Every tree and every large herb is thus a regular and well-organized catchment-basin, with its own mains and services; and it utilizes its water-supply by a cunningly adapted system of sucking rootlets, all placed at the exact spots where they will most surely absorb the amount of water that in each case runs down to them. So much is this true that in transplanting trees foresters and nurserymen know well you must lop the roots and the branches so as to cover equal superficial areas, or else the water will not fall on the parts best adapted to receive it; for, just as the lopped branches put forth new leaves and twigs at the point of section, so do the lopped roots put forth new rootlets and absorbent hairs at the place where they are now most urgently needed.
Not every kind of plant, however, manages its water-supply on the self-same system. There are dodges and devices. For herbs with leaves that spring from the rootstock alone, for example, without any visible above-ground stem, two main plans have been very widely adopted. One plan is that invented by plants like rhubarb, which have channelled leaves with grooved leaf-stalks, conducting all the water that falls upon their surface centrally towards the root. This is the centripetal type. Such plants resemble rather a funnel than an umbrella. They have always a straight tap-root, like a carrot; and this tap-root gives off numerous short rootlets on every side, which absorb all the water as it trickles down along the tapering surface of the inverted cone. The other plan — the centrifugal type — is adopted by certain plants with heart-shaped or arrow-shaped leaves, which have round leaf-stalks. In these cases the individual leaves point outward and downward, and the water drips from them not inward towards the centre, but outward towards the circumference. Their principle is rather umbrella-like than funnel-like. To meet this catchment system they have no long and descending tap-root, but just a short knobby root, which gives off long fibres radially in every direction; and these fibres terminate in knots or groups of absorbent rootlets exactly beneath the points where each leaf drips — the knobs or tags of the umbrella, to carry out our convenient metaphor. Examination of other and more complex plants reveals always the action of the same general law; each species has a peculiar catchment system of its own, more or less complicated, by means of which, directly or indirectly, all the water that falls upon its foliage is finally conducted to certain specified spots or drinking-places; and at those specified spots the plant provides beforehand an elaborate system of absorbent organs, exactly sufficient to suck up and utilize the average amount of water it expects to obtain and store at each of them. If London were a plant, now —— But hush! I am silent. A gathering frown on the reader’s brow warns me in time to steer clear of such human and political analogies.
XXVI. THE DEVIL’S PUNCHBOWL.
On Sunday the boys came home for their half-term holiday, so we strolled in the morning into the Devil’s Punchbowl. That is the name of the basin-shaped valley that lies behind the house — a deep circular glen, scooped out in a softer portion of the sandstone mass that forms the moor by rain and denudation. Thor owned it, I doubt not, long before it was claimed by its pr
esent possessor, for the parish is Thursley; and some Celtic god, whose name is only known to Professor Rhys, may have used it as his drinking-cup long before the Norseman brought his Thor, or the Saxon his Thunor, into the Surrey uplands. But the devil is now the heir-general and residuary legatee of all heathen gods deceased, be they late or early; he has come into titular ownership of their entire property. A steep path leads zigzag down the side of the escarpment into the bowl-shaped hollow; at its bottom a tiny stream oozes out in a spring as limpid as Bandusia. Water lies in the rock, indeed, at about two hundred and fifty feet below the surface of the moor, to which depth we have, accordingly, to sink our wells on the hilltop; and it is at about the same level that the springs gush forth which form the headwaters of our local rivers.
When we came upon the brook, as good luck would have it, a couple of farm labourers, in their workaday clothes, regardless of the Sabbath, lay at full length upon the bank, engaged in the picturesque, if not strictly legal, occupation of tickling trout. The boys were, of course, delighted; they had never seen the operation performed before, and were charmed at its almost mesmeric magic. At first the men, seeing gentlefolk approach, regarded us with disfavour, as their natural enemies, no doubt in league with the preserving landlord; but as soon as they discovered we were “the right sort,” in full sympathy with the fine old poaching proclivities of the upland population, they returned forthwith to their tickling with a zest, and landed a couple of trout, not to mention a crayfish, before the very eyes of the delighted schoolboys.
Tickling trout is an ancient and honourable form of sport, which admits of much skill and address in the tickler. The fish lurk quietly under overhanging banks, where an undermined green sod impends the tiny stream; and the operator passes his hand gently over their sides once or twice till he has established confidence; then, taking advantage of the friendship thus formed, he suddenly closes his hand and whips the astonished victim unawares out of the water. It has been urged by anglers (who are interested parties) that such conduct contains an element of treachery; but all is fair in love and war, of which last our contest with the wild creatures of nature is but a minor variety; and I cannot see that it matters much, ethically, whether you land your trout on the bank under pretence of titillating his sense of touch, or treacherously hook him by false show of supplying him with a dainty dinner. Indeed, all the trout I have interviewed on the subject are unanimously of opinion that, if you must be caught and eaten at all, they had rather be caught by a gentle pressure of the naked hand than have their mouths and feelings cruelly lacerated by a barbed hook disguised as a mayfly. Which reminds me of the charming French apologue of the farmer who called his turkeys together in order to ask them with what sauce they would prefer to be eaten. “Please, your Excellency,” said the turkeys, “we don’t want to be eaten at all.” “My friends,” said the farmer, “you wander from the question.”
It is curious, though, to see how this mere thread of water supports a whole isolated colony of its own, composed of many dozen kinds of fish, insects, and crustaceans, who know no more of other members of their race than the people on a small Pacific island knew of the human family before Captain Cook burst upon them from the blue, with the blessings of Christianity, rum, and extermination. These trout, for example, are a group apart; they are always small, even when adult, because there is little food for them, and the stream is little. In big rivers, where there is space to turn, and provisions are plentiful, a successful trout of the self-same species runs to five or six pounds, while the very near variety which frequents great lakes not infrequently grows to forty-five or fifty. But here, in this upland rill, an ounce or two is the limit. They live mostly in pairs, like well-conducted fish, one couple to each pool or overhung basin; yet, strange to say, if one is tickled or otherwise enticed away, the widowed survivor seems always to have found a mate before three hours are over. I know most of them personally, and love to watch their habits and manners. They are brilliantly speckled here, because the water is clear and the bottom pebbly; for the spots on trout depend on the bed, and come out brighter and more ornamental by far during the breeding season. This is still more conspicuously the case with the æsthetic stickleback, the dandy of the fresh waters; he puts on the most exquisite iridescent hues when he goes a-courting, and exhibits himself to his mate more gorgeously clad than Solomon in all his glory. Unfortunately, the colours are very fugacious, for they die away at once when he is taken out of the water; but while they last, they outshine in brilliancy the humming-bird or the butterfly. Both species are great and determined fighters, as always happens with brilliantly decorated birds, fishes, reptiles, and insects. None but the brave deserve the fair; and bravery and æsthetic taste seem to go together. Indeed, the courageous little trout will face and drive away a murderous pike who menaces his home, while stickleback will engage one another in such sanguinary fights for the possession of their mates that only the Kilkenny cats can be named in the same day with them.
The other inhabitants of the tiny brook are far more numerous than you would imagine. Miller’s-thumbs poke their big black heads out of holes in the clay bank at every quiet corner. Crayfish hide among the weeds or dart between the sedges. Stone-loach flit down stream like rapid shadows when you lift the bigger pebbles, under which they lie skulking. As for caddis-worms and water-spiders and the larvæ of dragon-flies, they are there by the hundred; while the full-blown insects — living flashes of light, as Tennyson calls them — poise their metallic blue bodies for a second over the ragged-robins that grow in the boggy hollows, and then dart away like lightning to the willow-herb in the distance. It is a world apart, this wee world of the streamlet; it has its own joys, its own fears, its own tragedies. The big solemn cows, with their placid great eyes, come down to drink at it unheeding, and blunder over the bank, and slide their cloven hoofs to the bottom through the clay, unaware that they have crushed a dozen maimed lives, and spread terror like an earthquake over fifty small fishes. But the trout and the loaches stand with tremulous fins beating the water meanwhile ten yards below, and aghast at the cataclysm that has altered for ever their native reach. Not for fully twenty minutes do they recover heart enough to sneak up stream once more to their ruined bank, and survey with strange eyes the havoc in their homesteads.
XXVII. THE LARK IN AUTUMN.
Men are out on the ridge hard by catching larks with mirrors. Catching skylarks for table! Just think of the sacrilege! Listen! As I write I can hear the dear birds carolling loud even now in the divine sunshine; singing gaily at heaven’s gate, as they sang for Shakespeare; pouring their full hearts, in their joy, as they poured them forth for Shelley! And these London jailbirds, slouching figures in short jackets and round-brimmed hats, have come down from their slums to our free Surrey moors, to catch and kill them! How I hope they will fail! To the lover of nature, in spite of the proverb; a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand — or, indeed, two thousand.
At this moment, to tell you true, our meadows and pastures are just thronged with skylarks. We have always dozens of them, proclaiming their gladness every sunshiny day in rich cataracts of music. But within the last few days the dozens have turned into scores and hundreds, for it is the time of the great influx of Continental larks over sea into England. There is a difference, too, though a slight one, between our true home birds and the hungry refugees who flock here for food and warmth in winter. Our native and resident skylark is the smaller bird of the two, and more russet in colour; the migrants who join him in our winter fields are both larger and darker. Their ashy isabelline plumage, cold grey granite in hue, has less of a generous rufous tinge to relieve it than in the true-born Briton. Such minor differences, indeed, between local races of allied type occur often in nature; they are the first beginnings out of which new kinds may in time be developed by natural selection. For instance, each important river of Britain has its own breed of salmon, to be recognized at sight — so they say — by the experienced fly-fisher. Thus, again
, in the matter of skylarks, our English type differs slightly in shape and hue from the Continental — just about as much as your John Bull differs from a Frenchman, or a German. As we approach the Mediterranean, a still paler and lighter form begins to take the place of the northern bird, and has been honoured (without due reason, I should think) with a separate Latin name, as a distinct species. It stands to our own ruddy-brown English skylark in something the same relation as the Moor or the Syrian stands to the Western European. This pale form, once more, straggles through Anatolia and across Central Asia; but merges in the Himalayas, Japan, and China into a russet mountain type, which is also regarded by systematic naturalists as a distinct species. The truth is, however, when you take any large area of the world together, it is impossible to draw distinct lines anywhere between one animal or plant and another. Kind melts into kind for the most part by imperceptible stages.
Even in the dreariest months our skylark still sings to us, at rarer intervals, on bright frosty mornings. He hovers over the grass when it sparkles and scintillates with crystal filigree. His music it is that so endears him to all of us. He is busy at work now, I see, in the stubble of the corn-fields, where, a useful ally of the agricultural interest, he picks out the seeds of black bindweed and corn-poppy — not unmixed, it is true, with occasional grains of wheat or barley. But he does far more good than harm, for all that. Natives and foreigners live amicably side by side, though they do not breed together; for the immigrants, mindful of their Baltic homes, go off again in early spring, leaving the smaller British birds to mate and nest and keep up the true blue blood of the Britannic skylark. While hard weather lasts, the families flock together in large mixed bodies, for mutual protection, I suppose, or else for love of companionship; but at the beginning of March they separate and pair, and during this tremulous season of love and courtship their song falls from the clouds still blither and louder and more constant than ever. It showers down upon us with lavish profusion. The male birds rise emulously, singing as they go, and displaying with pride their powers of song and flight before their mates and their rivals. Often they join battle at their giddy height for some coveted mate, and fight it out in the sky; she sits demure below on the dewy grass meanwhile, watching their deeds of prowess, listening to their bursting hearts, and ready to bestow herself, like ladies at a tournament, on the lover who proves himself the stoutest and the worthiest. For we must always remember that those liquid notes which thrill our souls on glad spring mornings have been acquired by the bird, not for our human delight, but as a charm for the ears of his own love-sick partner. For her he modulates his swelling throat; for her he showers down that fountain spray of melody. Time was when birds had no such musical skill, no such art of courtship; and traces still remain to us in many lands of that more primitive period. Just as man is most advanced, most civilized, most modern in Europe, so birds are most advanced, most developed, most musical of voice in the eastern continent. And just as primitive races linger on in South Africa, Polynesia, the Andaman Islands, to give us some pregnant hint of our own early ancestry, so more antique and less evolved types of bird linger on in South America and Australia, to show us some relics of the primitive winged fauna in the days before the sense of song was developed. South American species, belonging to the same great group of perchers as our own sweetest songsters — the nightingale, the thrush, the skylark, the linnet — are not only voiceless, but do not even possess the necessary organs for producing song. European and Asiatic birds, in other words, acquired their singing habits at a later period than the one at which their ancestors parted company for good with their South American relatives. Indeed, it is pleasant for the evolutionist to think that the whole course of the world’s evolution has been in one constant stream towards beauty and sweetness — towards lovelier plumage, daintier spots and dapplings, more graceful antlers, more waving crests, diviner song, intenser colour and scent of flowers. The subtlest perfumes belong to the newest types and families of blossom; the mellowest notes belong to the newest types and families of birds; the highest beauty belongs to the newest and most spiritual races of civilized humanity. The world, thank God! grows ever more lovely, more pure, more harmonious.
