by Grant Allen
All through the later Plantagenet period King’s Peddington kept up its position as a Continental port. Under the Tudors it seems to have been really one of the most important harbours upon the whole south coast of England. When the discovery of America and of the new route to India revolutionised English trade, by turning it westward towards the young plantations and the Cape, instead of eastward or southward towards Flanders and France, King’s Peddington still found itself in the full tide of rising commerce. More than one vessel left the old stone pier for Virginia and Barbadoes; and Churnside lads sailed with Raleigh to Guiana, and with Drake or Frobisher on their glorious foolhardy expeditions to round the world by the south and north passages. Indeed, the period included between the reigns of Edward IV. and Charles II. was the golden age of King’s Peddington. Absolutely speaking, the town must have been even smaller then than it is at the present day; for the plan preserved in the British Museum, among papers relating to the great Civil War, and representing the circuit of the walls during the siege, when the citizens held out stoutly against Prince Rupert for God and the Parliament, clearly indicates that only the quarter immediately surrounding the Buddle was then inhabited, while the modern main street and the Rectory road were still open fields, without even a cottage. Indeed, all the houses at that date lay within the walls; and the walls, which can even now be traced with the aid of the parish survey, enclosed a space not more than sufficient for a closely crowded population of 1500 or 1800 souls. But that was a large number as towns then went; and the relative importance of King’s Peddington was really far greater than it has ever since been. When railways, and even canals, were unthought of, small local seaports were of immense value as places of distribution for imported goods, and imported goods were gradually becoming more and more important throughout all this period to the average Churnside folks. Already sugar, rum, and tobacco were beginning to flow in from the New World; and the old records of the Peddington Custom-house, happily still to be seen in the loft of that delicious anachronism — the nation now spends £300 yearly here to collect £90 — show that the trade with the Mediterranean and the French coast was very considerable. The principal street lay along the Buddle under James II., where tradition still points out the house of a wealthy Peddington merchant occupied by Jeffreys during the Bloody Assize; and the trade of all Churnside and of many neighbouring districts must have centred for a couple of hundred years in that narrow, dingy, and malodorous alley.
With the eighteenth century, however, the star of King’s Peddington began to set. Our little harbour was well enough adapted for mediæval and Elizabethan craft, but it has not depth enough for bottoms drawing as many feet of water as did the larger vessels of the Georgian epoch. From the very beginning of the century all the smaller ports began to decay, while the larger ones, such as London, Bristol, Liverpool, Southampton, Plymouth, and Glasgow began to attract to themselves the whole external carrying trade of the country. It paid better to bring over cargo in bulk and distribute it overland or coastwise, by road or by small craft. So long as goods continued to be forwarded from Southampton — our nearest great port — mainly by means of pack-horses or waggons, a good many little coasting vessels used still to frequent King’s Peddington harbour, and the town still remained to some extent a distributing centre for the dale and the back country. But when, towards the end of the century, the canal was run through the heart of the county, and the new village of Harborne Port (as its founders ambitiously called it) was thus put in direct water communication with Bristol and London, the commercial importance of King’s Peddington rapidly decayed away to nothing. Harborne Port commanded a whole circle of trade in every direction, while Peddington commanded only a semicircle, the sea occupying the other half of its circuit. Thus the younger town quickly supplanted its elder rival. Of course, when the railway again cut through the same district, halfway between the old port and the new, leaving each of them seven miles off on either side, the sleepy market town of Churminster, formerly a mere agricultural centre, now becoming an important station, superseded them both as the export-collecting and import-distributing capital of the entire district. Nowadays, a stray collier puts in at the Peddington harbour about once in every six weeks with coal for the consumption of the town itself, and a few stone-boats carry away to London and elsewhere blue lias for making cement; but with these petty exceptions, the busy little harbour of Plantagenet times is to-day almost wholly given over to some half-dozen clumsy fishing smacks, with picturesque russet-brown sails of a sort to delight a painter’s heart.
Even after the commercial importance of the town had greatly passed away, it yet retained a certain amount of industrial importance through its thriving cloth works. The water-power on the Buddle gave it an advantage over many other places; and the presence of fullers’ earth in the oolitic deposits of the upper valley was, in those days of difficult carriage, a decided point in its favour. The introduction of steam, however, and, still more, the growth of the railway system, left poor Peddington out in the cold. The West-country cloth trade was quickly ruined by the competition of Bradford and the other Yorkshire towns. Stroud and Bradford-on-Avon, indeed, managed to keep up their position somehow — perhaps through their situation on considerable rivers with a splendid head of water; but little outlying towns like Peddington, away from the main lines of traffic, fell back hopelessly into agricultural obscurity. Coal and cotton, America and India, had revolutionised England. The north had outstripped the south, and everything tended northward accordingly. One by one the mills on the Buddle were closed: the owners were ruined, and the hands followed the stream to Saltaire, where hundreds of them found employment in a body. The last mill struggled on till 1870; the owner, a man with a conscience, went on working at a slight loss for many years, rather than turn adrift his people; but at last the responsibility of fifty mouths to feed daily wore him out, and at his death the only remaining factory was closed for ever. Since that date, the town has stagnated quietly as a fishing village and petty watering-place. Several pretty villas have been built upon the hill-side looking across the valley to the beautiful bay; and several half-pay colonels or retired Anglo-Indians have taken up their abode within them; but unless some new and unforeseen revolution should again fundamentally alter the relations of the country as coal and railways altered them fifty years since, the days of King’s Peddington as an independent centre of human life and activity have passed away. Henceforth it must only survive as a retreat for those workers whose own work (such as it is) has been done elsewhere.
THE END
Flashlights on Nature
CONTENTS
I. THE COWS THAT ANTS MILK
II. A PLANT THAT MELTS ICE
III. A BEAST OF PREY
IV. A WOODLAND TRAGEDY
V. MARRIAGE AMONG THE CLOVERS
VI. THOSE HORRID EARWIGS
VII. THE FIRST PAPER-MAKER
VIII. ABIDING CITIES
IX. A FROZEN WORLD
X. BRITISH BLOODSUCKERS
XI. A VERY INTELLIGENT PLANT
XII. A FOREIGN INVASION OF ENGLAND
I. THE COWS THAT ANTS MILK
DON’T let my title startle you; it was Linnæus himself who first invented it. Everybody knows the common little “green-flies” or “plant-lice” that cluster thick on the shoots of roses; and most people know that these troublesome small insects (from the human point of view) are the true source of that shining sweet juice, rather slimy and clammy, that covers so many leaves in warm summer weather, and is commonly called honey-dew. A good many people have heard, too, that ants use the tiny green creatures in place of cows, coaxing them with their feelers so as to make them yield up the sweet and nutritious juice which is the ants’ substitute for butter at breakfast. But comparatively few are aware how strange and eventful is the brief life-history of these insignificant little beasts which we destroy by the thousand in our flower-gardens or conservatories with a sprinkle of tobacco-water. To the world at large, t
he aphides, as we call them, are mere nameless nuisances — pests that infest our choicest plants; to the eye of the naturalist, they are a marvellous and deeply interesting group of animals, with one of the oddest pedigrees, one of the queerest biographies, known to science.
I propose, therefore, in this paper briefly to recount their story from the cradle to the grave; or, rather, to be literally accurate, from the time when they first emerge from the egg to the moment when they are eaten alive (with some hundreds of their kind) by one or other of their watchful enemies. In this task I shall be aided not a little by the clever and vivid dramatic sketches of the Aphides at Home, which have been prepared for me by my able and watchful collaborator, Mr. Frederick Enock, an enthusiastic and observant naturalist, who thinks nothing of sitting up all night, if so he may catch a beetle’s egg at the moment of hatching; and who will keep his eye to the microscope for twelve hours at a stretch, relieved only by occasional light refreshment in the shape of a sandwich, if so he may intercept some rare chrysalis at its moment of bursting, or behold some special grub spin the silken cocoon within whose case it is to develop into the perfect winged insect.
Rose-aphides, or “green-flies,” as most people call them, are, to the casual eye, a mere mass of living “blight” — a confused group of tiny translucent insects, moored by their beaks or sucking-tubes to the shoots of the plant on which they have been born, and which they seldom quit unless forcibly ejected. For they are no Columbuses. The spray of rose-bush figured in sketch No. 1 shows a small part of one such numerous household in quiet possession of its family tree, and engaged, as is its wont, in sucking for dear life at the juices of its own peculiar food-plant. You will observe that they are clustered closest at the growing-point. Each little beast of this complex family is coloured protectively green, so as to be as inconspicuous as possible to the keen eyes of its numerous enemies; and each sticks to its chosen twig with beak and sucker as long as there is anything left to drink in it, only moving away on its six sprawling legs when its native spot has been drained dry of all nutriment.
We often talk metaphorically of vegetating: the aphis vegetates. Indeed, aphides are as sluggish in their habits and manners as it is possible for a living and locomotive animal to be: they do not actually fasten for life to one point, like oysters or barnacles; but they are born on a soft shoot of some particular plant; they stick their sucking-tube into it as soon as they emerge; they anchor themselves on the spot for an indefinite period; and they only move on to a new “claim” when sheer want of food or force majeure compels them. The winged members are an exception: they are founders of new colonies, and are now on their way to some undiscovered Tasmania.
And, indeed, as we shall see, these stick-in-the-mud creatures have yet, in the lump, a most eventful history — a history fraught with strange loves, with hairbreadth escapes, with remorseless foes, with almost incredible episodes. They have enemies enough to satisfy Mr. Rider Haggard or the British schoolboy. If you look at No. 2, you will see the first stage in the Seven Ages of a rose-aphis family. The cycle of their life begins in autumn, with the annual laying of the winter eggs; these eggs are carefully deposited on the leaf-buds of some rose-bush, by a perfect wingless female, at the first approach of the cold weather. I say a perfect wingless female, because, as I shall explain hereafter, most aphides (and especially all the summer crops or generations that appear with such miraculous rapidity on our roses and fruit-trees) are poor fatherless creatures; waifs and strays, budded out vegetatively like the shoots of a plant.
About this strange retrogressive mode of reproduction, however, I shall have more to tell you in due time by-and-by; for the present, we will confine ourselves to the immediate history of the autumn brood, which is regularly produced in the legitimate fashion, as the result of an ordinary insect marriage between perfectly developed males and females. As October approaches, a special generation of such perfect males and females is produced by the unwedded summer green-flies; and the females of this brood, specially told off for the purpose, lay the winter eggs, which are destined to carry on the life of the species across the colder months, when no fresh shoots for food and drink are to be found in the frozen fields or gardens.
The eggs, so to speak, must be regarded as a kind of deferred brood, to bridge over the chilly time when living aphides cannot obtain a livelihood in the open. In No. 2 we see, above, a rose-twig with its leaf-buds, which are undeveloped leaves, inclosed in warm coverings, and similarly intended to bridge over the winter on behalf of the rose-bush. On this twig, then, we have the winter eggs of the aphis, mere dots represented in their natural size; they are providently laid on the bud, which in early spring will grow out into a shoot, and thus supply food at once for the young green-flies as they hatch and develop. So beautifully does Nature in her wisdom take care that blight in due season shall never be wanting to our Marshal Niels and our Gloires de Dijon!
In the same sketch, too, we have, below, a pathetic illustration, greatly magnified, of the poor old worn-out mother, a martyr to maternity, laying her last egg in the crannies of the bud she has chosen. I say “a martyr to maternity” in solemn earnest. You will observe that she is a shrivelled and haggard specimen of over-burdened motherhood. The duties of her station have clearly been too much for her. The reason is that she literally uses herself up in the production of offspring; which is not surprising, if you consider the relative size of egg and egg-layer. When this model mother began to lay, I can assure you she was fat and well-favoured, as attractive a young green-fly as you would be likely to come across in a day’s march on the surface of a rose-twig. But once she sets to work, she lays big eggs with a will (big, that is to say, compared with her own size), till she has used up all her soft internal material; and when she has finished, she dies — or, rather, she ceases to be; for there is nothing left of her but a dried and shrivelled skin.
During the winter, indeed — in cold climates at least — the race of aphides dies out altogether for the time being, or only protracts an artificial existence in the heated air of green-houses and drawing-rooms. The species is represented at such dormant periods by the fertilised eggs alone, which lie snug among the folds or scales of the buds till March or April comes back again to wake them. Then, with the first genial weather, the eggs hatch out, and a joyous new brood of aphides emerges. And here comes in one of the greatest wonders; for these summer broods do not consist, like their parents in autumn, of males and females, but of imperfect mothers — all mothers alike, all brotherless sisters, and all budding out young as fast as they can go, without the trouble and expense of a father. They put forth their progeny as a tree puts forth leaves, by mere division. The new broods thus produced are budded out tail first, as shown in No. 3, so that all the members of the family stand with their heads in the same direction, the mother moving on as her offspring increases; and since each new aphis instantly begins to fix its proboscis into the soft leaf-tissue, and in turn to bud out other broods of its own, you need not wonder that your favourite roses are so quickly covered with a close layer of blight in genial weather.
To say the truth, the rate of increase in aphides is so incredibly rapid, that one dare hardly mention it without seeming to exaggerate. A single industrious little green-fly, which devotes itself with a quiet mind to eating and reproduction, may easily within its own lifetime become the ancestor of some billions of great-grandchildren. It is not difficult to see why this should be so. The original parent buds out little ones from its own substance at a prodigious rate; and each of these juniors, reaching maturity at a bound, begins at once to bud out others in turn, so that as long as food and fine weather remain the population increases in an almost unthinkable ratio. Of course, it is the extreme abundance of food and the ease of living that result in this extraordinary rate of fertility; the race has no Malthus to keep it in check — each aphis need only plunge its beak into the rose-shoots or leaves and suck; it can get enough food without the slightest trouble to maintain it
self and a numerous progeny. It does not move about recklessly, or use up material in any excessive intellectual effort; all it eats goes at once to the production of more and more aphides in rapid succession.
Many things, however, conspire to show that aphides did not always lead so slothful a life: they are creatures with a past, the unworthy descendants of higher insects, which have degenerated to this level through the excessive abundance of their food, and through their adoption of what is practically a parasitic habit. When life is too easy, men and insects invariably degenerate: struggle is good for us. One of these little indications of a higher past Mr. Enock has given us in the upper part of sketch No. 3. For some members of the brood go through regular stages of grub and chrysalis, like any other flies; or, if you wish to be accurately scientific, pass through the usual forms of larva and pupa, before they reach the full adult condition. This, of course, shows them to be the descendants of higher insects which underwent the common metamorphosis of their kind. But most of the budded out, fatherless broods in summer are produced ready-made, without the necessity for passing through larval or infantile stages. Or rather, they never grow up: they merely moult; and they produce more young while they are still larvæ. They are born fully formed, and proceed forthwith to moor themselves, to feed, and to bud out fresh generations, without sensible interval. In No. 3 we have various stages in the development of the spring brood. Above we see the pupa, or chrysalis, produced from a grub (not very grub-like in shape), which has sprung from an egg; and on the right, below, we see the shrivelled larval skin from which it has just freed itself. This particular aphis was thus born as a six-legged larva from an autumn egg; it passes through the intermediate form of a pupa, or chrysalis; and it will finally develop into a winged “viviparous” female, such as you see in No. 4 below, putting out its young alive as fast as ever its wee body can bud them. You may observe, however, that in the case of aphides there is no great difference of form between the three successive stages. Larva, pupa, and fly are almost identical.
