Works of Grant Allen, page 733
ON CORNISH CLIFFS.
I am lying on my back in the sunshine, close to the edge of a great broken precipice, beside a clambering Cornish fishing village. In front of me is the sea, bluer than I have seen it since last I lay in like fashion a few months ago on the schistose slopes of the Maurettes at Hyères, and looked away across the plain to the unrippled Mediterranean and the Stœchades of the old Phocæan merchant-men. On either hand rise dark cliffs of hornblende and serpentine, weathered above by wind and rain, and smoothed below by the ceaseless dashing of the winter waves. Up to the limit of the breakers the hard rock is polished like Egyptian syenite; but beyond that point it is fissured by disintegration and richly covered with a dappled coat of grey and yellow lichen. The slow action of the water, always beating against the solid wall of crystalline rock, has eaten out a thousand such little bays all along this coast, each bounded by long headlands, whose points have been worn into fantastic pinnacles, or severed from the main mass as precipitous islets, the favourite resting-place of gulls and cormorants. No grander coast scenery can be found anywhere in the southern half of Great Britain.
Yet when I turn inland I see that all this beauty has been produced by the mere interaction of the sea and the barren moors of the interior. Nothing could be flatter or more desolate than the country whose seaward escarpment gives rise to these romantic coves and pyramidal rocky islets. It stretches away for miles in a level upland waste, only redeemed from complete barrenness by the low straggling bushes of the dwarf furze, whose golden blossom is now interspersed with purple patches of ling or the paler pink flowers of the Cornish heath. Here, then, I can see beauty in nature actually beginning to be. I can trace the origin of all these little bays from small rills which have worn themselves gorge-like valleys through the hard igneous rock, or else from fissures finally giving rise to sea-caves, like the one into which I rowed this morning for my early swim. The waves penetrate for a couple of hundred yards into the bowels of the rock, hemmed in by walls and roof of dark serpentine, with its interlacing veins of green and red bearing witness still to its once molten condition; and at length in most cases they produce a blow-hole at the top, communicating with the open air above, either because the fissure there crops up to the surface, or else through the agency of percolation. At last, the roof falls in; the boulders are carried away by the waves; and we get a long and narrow cove, still bounded on either side by tall cliffs, whose summits the air and rainfall slowly wear away into jagged and exquisite shapes. Yet in all this we see nothing but the natural play of cause and effect; we attribute the beauty of the scene merely to the accidental result of inevitable laws; we feel no necessity for calling in the aid of any underlying æsthetic intention on the part of the sea, or the rock, or the creeping lichen, in order to account for the loveliness which we find in the finished picture. The winds and the waves carved the coast into these varied shapes by force of blind currents working on hidden veins of harder or softer crystal: and we happen to find the result beautiful, just as we happen to find the inland level dull and ugly. The endless variety of the one charms us, while the unbroken monotony of the other wearies and repels us.
Here on the cliff I pick up a pretty fern and a blossoming head of the autumn squill — though so sweet a flower deserves a better name. This fern, too, is lovely in its way, with its branching leaflets and its rich glossy-green hue. Yet it owes its shape just as truly to the balance of external and internal forces acting upon it as does the Cornish coast-line. How comes it then that in the one case we instinctively regard the beauty as accidental, while in the other we set it down to a deliberate æsthetic intent? I think because, in the first case, we can actually see the forces at work, while in the second they are so minute and so gradual in their action as to escape the notice of all but trained observers. This fern grows in the shape that I see, because its ancestors have been slowly moulded into such a form by the whole group of circumstances directly or indirectly affecting them in all their past life; and the germ of the complex form thus produced was impressed by the parent plant upon the spore from which this individual fern took its birth. Over yonder I see a great dock-leaf; it grows tall and rank above all other plants, and is able to spread itself boldly to the light on every side. It has abundance of sunshine as a motive-power of growth, and abundance of air from which to extract the carbon that it needs. Hence it and all its ancestors have spread their leaves equally on every side, and formed large flat undivided blades. Leaves such as these are common enough; but nobody thinks of calling them pretty. Their want of minute subdivision, their monotonous outline, their dull surface, all make them ugly in our eyes, just as the flatness of the Cornish plain makes it also ugly to us. Where symmetry is slightly marked and variety wanting, as in the cabbage leaf, the mullein, and the burdock, we see little or nothing to admire. On the other hand, ferns generally grow in hedge-rows or thickets, where sunlight is much interrupted by other plants, and where air is scanty, most of its carbon being extracted by neighbouring plants which leave but little for one another’s needs. Hence you may notice that most plants growing under such circumstances have leaves minutely sub-divided, so as to catch such stray gleams of sunlight and such floating particles of carbonic acid as happen to pass their way. Look into the next tangled and overgrown hedge-row which you happen to pass, and you will see that almost all its leaves are of this character; and when they are otherwise the anomaly usually admits of an easy explanation. Of course the shapes of plants are mostly due to their normal and usual circumstances, and are comparatively little influenced by the accidental surroundings of individuals; and so, when a fern of such a sort happens to grow like this one on the open, it still retains the form impressed upon it by the life of its ancestors. Now, it is the striking combination of symmetry and variety in the fern, together with vivid green colouring, which makes us admire it so much. Not only is the frond as a whole symmetrical, but each frondlet and each division of the frondlet is separately symmetrical as well. This delicate minuteness of workmanship, as we call it, reminds us of similar human products — of fine lace, of delicate tracery, of skilful filagree or engraving. Almost all the green leaves which we admire are noticeable, more or less, for the same effects, as in the case of maple, parsley, horse-chestnut, and vine. It is true, mere glossy greenness may, and often does, make up for the want of variety, as we see in the arum, holly, laurel, and hart’s-tongue fern; but the leaves which we admire most of all are those which, like maidenhair, are both exquisitely green and delicately designed in shape. So that, in the last resort, the beauty of leaves, like the beauty of coast scenery, is really due to the constant interaction of a vast number of natural laws, not to any distinct aesthetic intention on the part of Nature.
On the other hand, the pretty pink squill reminds me that semi-conscious aesthetic design in animals has something to do with the production of beauty in nature — at least, in a few cases. Just as a flower garden has been intentionally produced by man, so flowers have been unconsciously produced by insects. As a rule, all bright red, blue, or orange in nature (except in the rare case of gems) is due to animal selection, either of flowers, fruits, or mates. Thus we may say that beauty in the inorganic world is always accidental; but in the organic world it is sometimes accidental and sometimes designed. A waterfall is a mere result of geological and geographical causes, but a bluebell or a butterfly is partly the result of a more or less deliberate æsthetic choice.
Flowers and Their Pedigrees
CONTENTS
PREFACE.
INTRODUCTORY.
I. THE DAISY’S PEDIGREE.
II. THE ROMANCE OF A WAYSIDE WEED.
III. STRAWBERRIES.
IV. CLEAVERS.
V. THE ORIGIN OF WHEAT.
VI. A MOUNTAIN TULIP.
VII. A FAMILY HISTORY.
VIII. CUCKOO-PINT.
PREFACE.
These little essays originally appeared as articles in ‘Longman’s Magazine,’ the ‘Cornhill Magazine,’ ‘Macmillan’s Magazine,’ the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ and ‘Belgravia,’ and I have to thank the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for kind permission to reprint them here. They are now offered to the public as a first instalment of a work which I hope some day more fully to carry out — a Functional Companion to the British Flora. We know by this time pretty well what our English wild flowers are like: we want to know next why they are just what they are, and how they came to be so.
G. A.
Lyme, Dorset:
July 1883.
INTRODUCTORY.
Our beautiful green England is carpeted, more than any other country in the world, perhaps, save only Switzerland and a few other mountain lands, with a perpetual sward of vivid verdure, interspersed with innumerable colours of daisies, and buttercups, and meadow-sweet, and harebells, and broader patches of purple heather. It is usual to speak of tropical vegetation, indeed, with a certain forced ecstasy of language; but those who know the tropics best, know that, though you may find a few exceptionally large and brilliant blossoms here and there under the breadth and shade of equatorial forests, the prevailing tone is one of monotonous dry greenery; and there is nothing anywhere in very southern climes to compare, as to mass of colour, with our Scotch hill-sides, our English gorse-clad commons, or our beautiful dappled meadows and cornfields, all aglow with the infinite wealth of poppies, bluebottles, foxgloves, ox-eye daisies, and purple fritillaries. The Alps alone can equal the brilliant colouring of our own native British flora. Poor as it is in number of species — a mere isolated fragment of the wider European groups — it can fearlessly challenge the rest of the whole world in general mingled effect of gaiety and luxuriance.
Now, every one of these English plants and weeds has a long and eventful story of its own. In the days before the illuminating doctrine of evolution had been preached, all we could say about them was that they possessed such and such a shape, and size, and colour: and if we had been asked why they were not rounder or bigger or bluer than they actually are, we could have given no sufficient reason, except that they were made so. But since the great principle of descent with modification has reduced the science of life from chaos to rational order, we are able to do much more than that. We can now answer confidently: Such and such a plant is what it is in virtue of such and such ancestral conditions, and it has been altered thus and thus by these and those variations in habit or environment. Every plant or animal, therefore, becomes for us a puzzle to be explained, a problem to be solved, a hieroglyphic inscription to be carefully deciphered. In the following pages, I have taken some half-dozen of familiar English weeds or flowers, and tried thus to make them yield up the secret of their own origin. Each of them is ultimately descended from the common central ancestor of the entire flowering group of plants; and each of them has acquired every new diversity of structure or appearance for some definite and useful purpose. As a rule, traces of all the various stages through which every species has passed are still visibly imprinted upon the very face of the existing forms: and one only requires a little care and ingenuity, a little use of comparison and analogy, to unravel by their own aid the story of their own remoter pedigree. This is the method which I have here followed in the papers that deal with the various modifications of the daisy, of the grasses, of the lilies, of the strawberry, and of the whole rose family.
Again, not only has each English plant a general history as a species, but it has also a separate history as a member of the British flora. Besides the question how any particular flower or fruit came to exist at all, we have to account for the question how it came to exist here and now in this, that, or the other part of the British Islands. For, of course, all plants are not to be found in all parts of the world alike, and their distribution over its surface has to be explained on historical grounds just as a future ethnologist would have to explain the occurrence of isolated French communities in Lower Canada and Mauritius, of African negroes in Jamaica and Brazil, or of Chinese coolies in San Francisco and the Australian colonies. In this respect, our English plants open out a series of interesting problems for the botanical researcher; because we happen to possess a very mixed and fragmentary flora, made up to a great extent of waifs and strays from at least three large distinct continental groups, besides several casual colonists. Thus while at Killarney we get a few rare Spanish or Portuguese types, in Caithness and the Highlands we get a few rare Alpine or Arctic types: and while in Norfolk and Suffolk we find some central European stragglers, the ponds of the Hebrides are actually occupied by at least one American pond-weed, its seeds having been wafted over by westerly breezes, or carried unconsciously by water-birds in the mud and ooze which clung accidentally to their webbed feet. Moreover, we know that at no very remote period, geologically speaking, Britain was covered by a single great sheet of glaciers, like that which now covers almost all Greenland: and we may therefore conclude with certainty that every plant at present in the country has entered it from one quarter and another at a date posterior to that great lifeless epoch. This, then, gives rise to a second set of problems, the problems connected with the presence in England of certain stray local types, Alpine or Arctic, Southern or Transatlantic, European or Asiatic. Questions of this sort I have raised and endeavoured to answer with regard to two rare English plants in the papers on the hairy spurge and the mountain tulip.
In short, these little essays deal, first with the evolution of certain plant types in general; and secondly with their presence as naturalised citizens of our own restricted petty insular floral commonwealth.
I. THE DAISY’S PEDIGREE.
Fig. 1. — The Common Daisy.
Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much man loses for want of that microscopic eye upon whose absence complacent little Mr. Pope, after his optimistic fashion, was apparently inclined rather to congratulate his fellow-beings than otherwise? What a wonderful world we should all live in if only we could see it as this little beetle here sees it, half buried as he is in a mighty forest of luxuriant tall green moss! Just fancy how grand and straight and majestic those slender sprays must look to him, with their waving, feathery branches spreading on every side, a thousand times more gracefully than the long boughs of the loveliest tropical palm trees on some wild Jamaican hill-side. How quaint the tall capsules must appear in his eyes — great yellow seed-vessels nearly as big as himself, with a conical, pink-edged hood, which pops off suddenly with a bang, and showers down monstrous nuts upon his head when he passes beneath. Gaze closely into the moss forest, as it grows here beside this smooth round stone where we are sitting, and imagine you can view it as the beetle views it. Put yourself in his place, and look up at it towering three hundred feet above your head, while you vainly strive to find your way among its matted underbrush and dense labyrinths of close-grown trunks. Then just look at the mighty monsters that people it. The little red spider, magnified to the size of a sheep, must be a gorgeous and strange-looking creature indeed, with his vivid crimson body and his mailed and jointed legs. Yonder neighbour beetle, regarded as an elephant, would seem a terrible wild beast in all seriousness, with his solid coat of bronze-burnished armour, his huge hook-ringed antennæ, and his fearful branched horn, ten times more terrible than that of a furious rhinoceros charging madly through the African jungle. Why, if you will only throw yourself honestly into the situation, and realise that awful life-and-death struggle now going on between an ant and a May-fly before our very eyes, you will see that Livingstone, and Serpa Pinto, and Gordon Cumming are simply nowhere beside you: that even Jules Verne’s wildest story is comparatively tame and commonplace in the light of that marvellous miniature forest. Such a jumble of puzzle-monkeys, and bamboos, and palms, and banyan trees, and crags, and roots, and rivers, and precipices was never seen; inhabited by such a terrible and beautiful phantasmagoria of dragons, hippogriffs, unicorns, rocs, chimæras, serpents, and wyverns as no mediæval fancy ever invented, no Greek mythologist ever dreamt of, and no Arabian story-teller ever fabled. And yet, after all, to our clumsy big eyes, it is but a little patch of familiar English grass and mosses, crawled over by half a dozen sleepy slugs and long-legged spiders, and slimy earthworms.
