by Grant Allen
The succeeding illustrations show you in detail the various stages in the process of emergence. No. 8 gives you the beginning of emancipation. The pupa has here bitten its way through the leaf-sheath with its hard, horny jaws, and is protruding visibly. Just at first, only the head itself gets free; then the insect rests a while after its arduous labour, and begins wriggling and writhing again, this time working out its body or thorax. After another short interval for recuperation after such a terrific effort, it manages to pull its legs through the hole, and to support itself upon them by resting them like a bracket against the stem of the barley. This is the point just reached in the illustration No. 8. There the pupa stops short, having got himself into a convenient position for dispensing with his coverlet; for the sheath of the barley grasps the pupa-skin tight as in a vice, and he can wriggle his winged body free within it, without paying any further attention to the disused mummy-case which once confined it.
In No. 9, the pupa being thus safely anchored, the fly is emerging. It is a slow and delicate process, for with so many legs and wings and antennæ and appendages to get free from the mummy-case, one cannot hurry: haste might be fatal. At this first stage of emergence, as you will observe, all the important parts are still cramped at their ends within the pupa-shell; but you can see how the legs and antennæ are striving to disengage themselves. The pupa covering is propped as before by the empty leg-shells so as to form a bracket.
In No. 10 — hurrah! with a supreme effort, our fly has got her antennæ free! She can move them to and fro now, in all their jointed and tufted glory. That enables her to wag her head in either direction without difficulty, and encourages her to go on to fresh exertions for the rest of the deliverance. But her feet are still fast in that hampering mummy-case; she must try her hardest now to free them each carefully.
First, however, let her get the tips of her wings free to help them. One good jerk and out comes the first wing. Now she bends backward and forward and seems straining every nerve. Halloa, that did it; the other wing is free! Not as yet, however, plimmed out and flattened as it will be a little later; both wings at present look somewhat thick and lumpy and stick-like. Such as they are you see them in No. 11, rather clumsy specimens, while our lady goes on with redoubled energy, now concentrating her efforts on her front pair of legs — for when you have six to think of, one pair at a time is about as much as you can easily manage.
In No. 11, the first pair, you will note, is all but free. She wriggles out one of them, and then its fellow. Oh, how she tugs and pulls at them! Meanwhile, the tufts of hair on the antennæ, which at first were bunchy and little developed, have begun to expand; she looks, by this time, distinctly more like a respectable insect. Well done, once more; two pairs of legs now free. No. 12 shows them. But, take care; we are getting now rather far out of the mummy-case. Be sure you don’t overbalance, and tumble bodily out, tearing your hind pair of legs off, with the force of your fall. Those thin shanks are brittle, and you find little support now from the empty skin and the hollow bracket.
Nature, however, is wiser than her critics. Just when it looks as if next moment the fly must lose her balance and topple over, she twists suddenly round, with a dexterous lunge, catches the bent stem with two of her free legs, and anchors herself securely. No. 13 shows how this is done. Below is the now almost empty pupa-shell, still enclosing the last two legs, on freeing which our astute little enemy is busily occupied. But with the two legs on her upper side (as she stands in the illustration) she has caught at the barley-stem, one foot being firmly planted below the bend, and one above it. This gives her a fine purchase to depend upon in her last wild blow for freedom. A long pull, and a strong pull, and she has got — what the modern woman so ardently craves — complete emancipation! The third pair of legs are out at last; she has all the world before her to wander over and lay eggs in.
In No. 14 you see her, then, free, but resting. She has now shaken herself out, and left her empty mummy-case imprisoned at her side in the sheath which holds it. Its fate no longer interests her. Then she crawls a little way along the surface of the barley-stem, and presently, clasping it with her four front legs, she hangs herself up, tail downward, to dry in the sunshine. No. 14 graphically represents this curious position. Almost all flying insects, when they emerge from the chrysalis stage, do something analogous. Their wings are still club-like, their antennæ undeveloped or not fully expanded, their jointed legs weak and groggy. But after a time, as they breathe or inflate themselves with air, all these parts grow fuller, lighter, and harder. The Hessian fly in this predicament waves her wings to and fro several times across her back; and in about a quarter of an hour they have plimmed out fully, so that she can soar away on her marriage flight to meet her prospective aërial husband. As for the tiny silvery shroud or deserted pupa-case, it is left protruding from the stem of the barley.
This that I have given you is the history of a successful and fortunate fly; but not every individual of the species is quite so lucky. As in the case of the mosquito, nature at times makes not a few failures. Sometimes the flies have insuperable difficulty in freeing themselves from their articulated coverings; sometimes they break or spoil their legs or wings, and become helpless cripples. Yet so strong is the impulse of every species to fill the world with its like that sometimes, says Mr. Enock, even these poor maimed insects will manage to crawl to a proper food-plant, and will lay their eggs on it bravely like their more fortunate sisters. He noted one crippled female which in spite of its feebleness was eighty times over a happy mother. This is usually the case with such small insect pests; their life consists, indeed, of two things only, eating their way to the winged stage, and then laying as many eggs as possible, to do like damage in the next generation.
Three or four hours after emerging, when they have had time to accustom themselves to the outer air, the male flies soar abroad on gauzy wings to seek their mates; the ladies, on the contrary, are coy, not to say somewhat sluggish, and oftenest wait at home on the under side of a leaf till their lords come to woo them. The well-bred Hessian fly does not gad about to seek a husband. But that is only while she is a maiden; as soon as it comes to laying eggs, she wakes up at once, and takes to business with the utmost energy. She flies off around the fields and looks out a fresh young barley-plant, suitable for a nursery. On its leaves she alights, with her head towards the tip of the blade, and begins depositing her precious burden. When once she has started, she sticks to it for life, using herself up (like our old friend the aphis) in the duties of maternity, and laying as many eggs as she possesses material for. Her conduct, in short, would be exemplary, if she wasted her life on thistles or nettles, and didn’t choose to display her maternal affection on the British farmer’s barley. So she goes on till she has worn herself out, and often till she has broken three or four of her legs in the pursuit of duty. Then, when she grows quite exhausted, and feels her latter end drawing nigh, she hides herself in the ground — buries herself alive, in fact; and there awaits death with patient resignation.
The average lifetime of the Hessian fly in the adult winged stage seems to be about five days for the females, and probably a good deal less for the males. The bachelors in search of a wife fly sometimes for long distances across country; but their prospective partners are almost always shyer and more maidenly; they hide under the leaves and travel but short distances, considering it more ladylike to stop at home and wait for suitors than to go out and seek them. They are not new women. Indeed, so great is their modesty that they often hide in holes in the ground to escape observation; and they usually alight on the earth, as their colour is blackish, and they are there less exposed to the attacks of birds and other enemies than on the green foliage. It is a noticeable fact in nature that many species of animals seem thus to know instinctively the colours with which their own hues will best harmonise, and to poise by preference on such colours; many dappled or speckled insects, for example, resting with folded wings on the dappled and speckl
ed flower-bunches of the carrot tribe, while green insects affect rather green leaves, and brown or black insects come to anchor on the soil, which best protects them. This is not quite the same thing as what is called protective colouring, such as occurs in desert animals, most of which are spotted like the sand, or in the fishes and crabs which frequent the sargasso-weed in the Sargasso Sea, all of which are of the same pale lemon-yellow tint as the seaweed they lurk among; for this case of the Hessian fly includes a deliberate choice of ingrained habit. The insect has many objects of many different colours spread about in its neighbourhood, but it habitually selects as its resting-place those particular objects which most closely approach its own peculiar ground-tint.
It is a curious fact, however, that in spite of all the apparent pains bestowed upon securing the perpetuation of such destructive creatures as the Hessian fly, the pest itself has its own enemies, as fatal to its life as it is to the barley. Ichneumon flies and other parasites prey by millions on the Hessian fly in its grub condition; and many good authorities believe that the safest way of checking the depredations of the barley-plague is by encouraging the multiplication of its natural enemies. No. 15 shows us one of these industrious little scourges actually at work. She alights on a stem of barley infested by grubs of the Hessian fly, and walks slowly along it, tapping gently as she goes, much as a woodpecker taps with his bill on a tree-trunk to discover the spot where a worm lies buried. After carefully examining the surface, she finds at last a place where something, either in the sound or the feeling of the stem, reveals to her the presence of a Hessian fly grub within the leaf-sheath. Having accurately diagnosed the spot (like a doctor with a stethoscope), she brings her ovipositor (in plain English, her egg-layer) just above the place where the grub is lying snug in its green bed, and pierces the hard leaf-blade with her sharp little lancet. Then she lays her egg in the body of the larva. This egg gives rise in time to a parasitic grub, inside the first one; and the parasite eats out his host’s body, and emerges in due time as a full-grown fly, ready to carry on the same cycle in future. More than nine-tenths of the Hessian fly grubs hatched out in America are thus destroyed by parasites before they reach maturity; and it seems likely that the surest way of fighting insect plagues like the Hessian fly is by encouraging the increase of such natural destroyers.
At first sight, to be sure, it may seem improbable that man could do anything to “encourage” the reproduction of such very small creatures; but that is not really so. All that is necessary is to keep the straw in which the parasitic grubs abound, and so allow the two hostile kinds to fight it out among themselves for the farmer’s benefit. Mr. Enock mentions an instructive case of this sort from America, where the Californian orange-growers were almost being ruined by the depredations of the scale-insect, a queer little beast which you may often find on the rind of certain imported oranges. But an enemy to the scale-insect was discovered in Australia — an enemy to the scale-insect, and therefore an ally of the harassed orange-grower. It was a particular kind of lady-bird, which devours in its larval stage whole tribes of the scale-insects. That wonderful entomologist, Professor Riley, whose services were worth many millions of pounds to the American farmers, got wind betimes of this new destroyer, and imported a few specimens, actually sending a skilled agent to Australia to collect them. The precious little creatures were housed at once in a muslin tent, covering a scale-infested orange tree; and there, rising to a sense of the duty imposed upon them, they laid their eggs on the leaves with commendable promptitude. The larvæ soon hatched out, and began feeding upon the scale-insects; and in an incredibly short time there were beetles enough on that single tree to distribute by boxfuls among the distressed agriculturists. The result was that before very long the scale-insect became a rare specimen in California. But that was in the United States; English folk are too “practical” to take any notice of those theoretical men of science. They put their hands in their pockets and let their crops get destroyed in the good old “practical” way; then they shake their heads and observe with a smile that “there are great difficulties” in the way of doing anything.
THE END
Side Lights
CONTENTS
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR.
AN INTRODUCTORY WORD ABOUT THE BOOK.
I. LETTER-WRITERS.
II. ON WRITING ONESELF OUT.
III. THE DECLINE OF LITERATURE.
IV. COLOUR-BLINDNESS IN LITERATURE.
V. THE SURFEIT OF BOOKS.
VI. PEOPLE WHO ARE “DOWN”
VII. ILL-ASSORTED MARRIAGES.
VIII. HAPPY MARRIAGES.
IX. SHREWS.
X. ARE WE WEALTHY?
XI. THE VALUES OF LABOUR.
XII. THE HOPELESS POOR.
XIII. WAIFS AND STRAYS.
XIV. STAGE-CHILDREN.
XV. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORALITY: PAST AND PRESENT.
XVI. “RAISING THE LEVEL OF AMUSEMENTS.”
XVII. A LITTLE SERMON ON FAILURES.
XVIII. “VANITY OF VANITIES.”
XIX. GAMBLERS.
XX. SCOUNDRELS.
XXI. QUIET OLD TOWNS.
XXII. THE SEA.
XXIII. SORROW.
XXIV. DEATH.
XXV. JOURNALISM.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR.
I knew James Runciman but little, and that little for the most part in the way of business. But no one could know that ardent and eager soul at all, no matter how slightly, without admiring and respecting much that was powerful and vigorous in his strangely-compounded personality. His very look attracted. He had human weaknesses not a few, but all of the more genial and humane sort; for he was essentially and above everything a lovable man, a noble, interesting, and unique specimen of genuine, sincere, whole-hearted manhood.
He was a Northumbrian by birth, “and knew the Northumbrian coast,” says one of his North-Country friends, “like his mother’s face.” His birthplace was at Cresswell, a little village near Morpeth, where he was born in August, 1852, so that he was not quite thirty-nine when he finally wore himself out with his ceaseless exertions. He had a true North-Country education, too, among the moors and cliffs, and there drank in to the full that love of nature, and especially of the sea, which forms so conspicuous a note in his later writings. Heather and wave struck the keynotes. A son of the people, he went first, in his boyhood, to the village school at Ellington; but on his eleventh birthday he was removed from the wild north to a new world at Greenwich. There he spent two years in the naval school; and straightway began his first experiences of life on his own account as a pupil teacher at North Shields Ragged School, not far from his native hamlet.
“A worse place of training for a youth,” says a writer in The Schoolmaster, “it would be hard to discover. The building was unsuitable, the children rough, and the neighbourhood vile — and the long tramp over the moors to Cresswell and back at week ends was, perhaps, what enabled the young apprentice to preserve his health of mind and body. His education was very much in his own hands. He managed in a few weeks to study enough to pass his examinations with credit. The rest of his time was spent in reading everything which came in his way, so that when he entered Borough-road in January, 1871, he was not only almost at the top of the list, but he was the best informed man of his year. His fellow candidates remember even now his appearance during scholarship week. Like David, he was ruddy of countenance, like Saul he towered head and shoulders above the rest, and a mass of fair hair fell over his forehead. Whene’er he took his walks abroad he wore a large soft hat, and a large soft scarf, and carried a stick that was large but not soft.”
To this graphic description I will add a second one. “He was a splendid all-round athlete,” says another friend, who knew him at this time, in the British and Foreign School Society’s London college. “Six feet two or three in height, and with a fine muscular development, he could box, wrestle, fence, or row with all comers, and beat them with ridiculous ease. No one could have been made to believ
e that he would die, physically worn out, before he was forty. His intellectual mastery was as unquestioned as his physical superiority; he always topped the examination lists, to the chagrin of some of the lecturers, whom he teased sadly by protesting against injustice the moment it peeped out, by teaching all the good young men to smoke prodigiously, by scattering revolutionary verses about the college, and finally by collecting and burning in one grand bonfire every copy of an obnoxious text-book under which the students had long suffered.”
This was indeed the germ of the man as we all knew him long afterwards.
Runciman left the college to take up the mastership of a London Board School in a low part of Deptford; and here he soon gained an extraordinary influence over the population of one of the worst slums in London. Mr. Thomas Wright, the “Journeyman Engineer,” has already told in print elsewhere the story of Runciman’s descent into the depths of Deptford, how he set about humanising the shoeless, starving, conscience-little waifs who were drafted into his school, and how, before many months had passed, he never walked through the squalid streets of his own quarter without two or three loving little fellows all in tatters trying to touch the hem of his garment, while a group of the more timid followed him admiringly afar off. From the children, his good influence extended to the parents; and it was an almost every-day occurrence for visitors from the slums to burst into the school to fetch the master to some coster who was “a-killin’ his woman.” The brawny young giant would dive into the courts where the police go in couples, clamber ricketty stairs, and “interview” the fighting pair. “His plan was to appeal to the manliness of the offender, and make him ashamed of himself; often such a visit ended in a loan, whereby the ‘barrer’ was replenished and the surly husband set to work; but if all efforts at peacemaking were useless, this new apostle had methods beyond the reach of the ordinary missionary — he would (the case deserving it) drop his mild, insinuating, persuasive tones, and not only threaten to pulp the incorrigible blackguard into a jelly, but proceed to do it.”
