Part 11

APRIL 17, 1900

The west wind this morning had a rolling sonorousness which sent my thoughts flying, swift as light, across all the little intervening ridges, over the plains, over the villages, across endless housetops, through multitudinous suburbs, over the big, ugly, stately town; out again, over fresh sweeps of more or less encumbered green fields, hedgerows, lanes, roads; past meadows and orchards, redolent of centuries of care; past brickfields and coalfields, redolent only of defiling greed; over a fretful space of sea; across more fields, less enclosed, less cultivated, but certainly not less green. On and on breathlessly, until I stood--free of all encumbrances, free of any thought of luggage, conveyance, or the need of a roof to shelter under--upon a very familiar spot, close to the tumbling breast of the Atlantic.

The clearness, or lack of clearness, with which certain familiar spots rise before the eye is one of the minor mysteries of life; mysteries which like many larger ones we are never likely to clear up entirely to our satisfaction. There are moments in my experience when such a spot as this that I am thinking of, is in a sense more vivid to me away from it than if I were standing there in person; when every tuft of bog myrtle becomes clearly visible; every yard of “drift” or of “boulder clay” shows in its entirety; the very stones fallen from them, and lying like small cannon-balls upon the beach, being all able to be counted. The waves toss; the clouds roll wearily; the seaweed rises and falls, as it naturally would. No scene in a cinematograph could by any possibility be clearer.

This is the vivid condition. An hour later one tries to conjure up the same familiar scene, and not a detail will rise to one’s bidding. Not a leaf, not a stone, not a wave will become manifest. Clearness is gone. A dull, blurred impression is all that remains. The landscape as a whole may be there, but its details are lost. That living, multitudinous-tinted foreground has vanished as though it had never existed.

It must have been the scent of the bog plants which conferred that momentary impression upon me this morning. That scents “open the wards of memory with a key” we all know. They do more, for they sweep away for the moment those films which ordinarily cover the mental eye, so that during that moment we really do see. Of all scents commend me for this awakening quality to the boggy ones. They alone in my experience are really transformatory. For the brief time that their aroma is in one’s nostrils one actually is in the place that they recall.

It is a proof of the demoralising effect of ownership that one of my first impulses nowadays is a desire to transfer the plants that I see, sometimes that I merely remember, from where they are to where I happen to want them. Yet, when one thinks of it, what an outrage! Why should one desire to do anything of the sort? Conceive the contrast, the downfall; the roominess, the elemental breadth, the cool, rain-saturated comfort of the one setting; the cramped limitation, the unpalatable dryness of the other. Not that I would for worlds disparage our own faithful coppice; to do so would be to show myself the merest of ingrates. Was I not an alien, and did it not befriend me? Was I not roofless, and did it not offer its soil for us to lift a roof over? Still, when one tries to place the one scene beside the other the contrast becomes farcical. The very wind--the cold, unsentimental wind--must be sensible of such a difference. How much more then a root-extending, acutely sensitive, living thing!

I have a profound affection for bog plants, which I hope some of them respond to, for they thrive fairly. Others are exceedingly difficult to establish, and rarely look anything but starved and homesick. Amongst these are the butterworts. Why the translation should so particularly affect them I have yet to learn, but the fact is unmistakable. Not all the water of all our taps, not all the peat of all our hillsides will persuade them to be contented. In vain I have wooed them with the wettest spots I could find; in vain erected poor semblances of tussocks for their benefit; have puddled the peat till it seemed impossible that any creature unprovided with eyes could distinguish it from a bit of real bog. No, die they will, and die they hitherto always have.

The sundews, on the other hand, are much less hard to please. Indeed, considering that at least one species grows wild within a few miles of us, it would be the height of affectation were they to refuse to tolerate us. I find myself falling into the habit of thinking that I am inhabiting here a region of eternal thirstiness, devoid of the materials of sustaining any vegetable more requiring in the matter of water than a gaillardia. Yet, when one considers the matter seriously, England is not precisely the Great Sahara! There are brown streams, purling brooks, dripping wells, rushy meadows, even puddles and bog-holes, to be found a good deal nearer to this spot than the Atlantic. We are purblind citizens all of us; apt to dogmatise largely upon an uncommonly small substratum of knowledge. Like the moles and the blindworms we know remarkably well the few inches that we can actually feel and touch; but with regard to what John Locke calls “the rest of the vast expansum,” that we give up to fog and practical non-existence, thereby saving ourselves from the trouble of knowing anything about it.

APRIL 18, 1900

Yet even dull, and quite unfeathered bipeds have their glimmerings now and then of sense, and of instinct. There are hours in which the great Mother befriends them, as she does the rest of her two-legged, four-legged, or many-legged offspring. That she should continue to do so is I think amiable, and rather surprising on her part, when one considers how they disobey and deride her; how they sit day after day in stuffy rooms, eating dinners of many courses; hardly ever getting up to see the sun rise, or doing any of the other things she directs, and which her better-behaved scholars invariably do.

In spite of this, when the right winds blow, when the spring is afoot, and the leaves are beginning to bud, she allows the old visions to return to them. She brings back the old voices from the old haunts, to whisper once more in their ears, so that for the moment they forget the years that the locust has eaten, and their own incredible stupidities, and all that has been, and time rolls itself up like a scroll, and they are once again in very deed, though but for a little while, as they once were.

There is a spot in a hill-wood barely a mile from this door, to which I have been a good many times this spring, and which each time I go gives me a curiously homely feeling. Ireland seems to breathe in it, even West Ireland, though I can hardly say why, the only apparent reason being the rather unpatriotic one that the fir trees, of which the wood consists, have been sadly neglected. It covers an unusually steep bit of hillside, and below expands into a tangle of brakes and brambles, circling about a hollow place, which in my mind’s eye I conceive to be a boggy pool, though, were I to clamber down to it, I should probably find it to be dust-dry. Far and near not a roof is within sight, else were that illusion for a certainty lost. Moreover, the only bit of distance visible seems to be houseless also, and in these grey, rather despondent-looking spring days wears just a touch of that wistful indefiniteness, the lack of which, one is apt to assert, amongst many beauties, to be England’s most conspicuous blemish.

Until the last great summons comes for us, we can never, happily, entirely lose what has once formed a part of our little mental patrimony. We may deliberately discard it, or, what oftener happens, it may get unintentionally overlaid with other matters, so that it appears to be gone, but a little search, or some happy accident, brings it flying swiftly back, and the pleasure of that repossession is so great that it seems almost worth while that the thing should have been temporarily mislaid.

Of all such inalienable possessions the love of out-of-door life is surely the most inalienable? And is it not profoundly natural that it should be so? For this race, to which one belongs, was after all born under an open sky, even though every individual of which it is composed may have been born to-day under roofs. We do not any longer require the comfort of sheltering boughs, nor yet to nestle at night in moss-lined hollows, but the thought of such places still lurks in our blood, and the life of out-of-doors remains as much a part of the natural inheritance of a man, as it is a part of the inheritance of a fox, or of a wood-pigeon, or of a tiger moth.

Back, back--like the touch of half-forgotten greetings--comes a flood of remembrances to the heart. Back flows the old stream along its old channels. No longer tearing along with a wild tumultuous rush, but still sweeping by, full and clear, with a pleasant afternoon patter, and showing many an unlooked-for nook, many a forgotten corner along its banks, once we surrender ourselves frankly to its guidance. Back the scenes return; ever back and back; now vividly; now with a dream-like vagueness; scenes, some of them, that we have ourselves known, others to which we have only as it were a communal right. Waking hours under the flickering shade of leaves; life as it was lived in a larger, freer world; a world without walls or hedgerows; without sign-posts, or notice-boards; a world without towns, or smoke; without dust, or crowds.

It has been often debated, and not perhaps very profitably, which of two types of men see deepest into that great arcanum of life which we roughly call Nature. Is it the Man of Science, whose business it is to chronicle what he sees and learns, but who must never travel half an inch beyond his brief? who must cling to fact, as the samphire-picker clings to his rope, and never for an instant relax his hold of it? Or is it on the other hand the Singer, who is only too ready to toss all fact to the winds, and to account it mere dust, and dregs and dross, so he can awaken in himself, and pass on to others, some hint, some passing impression, of what he would probably himself call the soul of things?

Time was when the barrier between these two types was held to be an absolutely impassable one. We call ours a prosaic age, but it is certainly one of its better points, and a mitigation of that prose, that those barriers hardly appear to us so absolutely impregnable as they once were. If we have never seen a great scientist combined with a great poet it is at least not inconceivable that the world may some day behold such a combination. Even within the generation just over, and in utilitarian England, there have been one or two men who have given us at all events an inkling of so desirable a possibility.

Given a mind that can feed on knowledge, without becoming surfeited by it; a mind to which it has become so familiar that it has grown to be as it were organic; a mind for which facts are no longer heavy, but light, so that it can play with them, as an athlete plays with his iron balls, and send them flying aloft, like birds through the air. Given such a mind, so fed by knowledge, so constituted by nature, and it is not easy to see limits to the realms of thought and of discovery, to the feats of reconstruction, still more perhaps to the feats of reconciliation, which may not, some day or other, be open to it.

APRIL 26, 1900

The reddening of our sundew patch has brought back to my mind various sundew experiments, carried on long since, with all the zeal of youth and enthusiasm. In this, as in every other walk of biology, the investigators of those days, amateur and scientist alike, followed with docility in the wake of their master. Darwin played the tune, and all the rest of us, great and small, danced to his piping.

To the best of my recollection my own investigations were chiefly carried on standing stork fashion upon a tussock, surrounded by an inky opacity, which threatened to draw the investigator downwards with a clutch, more tenacious and formidable than that of any sundew. To the faithful Irish botanist the poverty of the Flora of Ireland as compared with that of Great Britain has always been a serious humiliation. In this respect these Droseraceæ form an exception. Of the few British species all, I think, are to be found upon the bogs of the West of Ireland, the largest of them--appropriately called anglica--being much commoner in Ireland than elsewhere in these islands.

A very slight acquaintance with their habits could hardly fail, I think, to convince even the most sceptical that their roots are mainly employed as anchors, and water-pipes, while for a supply of that nitrogen which every plant requires they are chiefly, if not exclusively, dependent upon insects. Of these the two lesser species would appear to content themselves with the smallest of Diptera and Lepidoptera, whereas anglica will occasionally tackle larger prey, and I have myself seen it with a good-sized moth (a noctua) attached to and nearly covering the entire disk, the long tentacle-like hairs being closely inflected over the victim, whose struggles are soon put an end to, once the sticky secretion exuding from the hairs closes above the trachea. When the leaf re-opens nearly the whole of the insect (be it fly, moth or beetle) will be found to have disappeared, even the wings being reduced to a few glittering fragments. No animal substance in fact comes amiss; fragments of bone, hide, meat-fibrine, and even, according to one authority, tooth enamel, softening, and in time dissolving under the powerful solvent secreted by the glands. Whether the Droseraceæ have the power of attracting their prey, or must wait until chance sends it within their clutches, seems undecided. In the case of a little Portuguese relative, one Drosophylum lusitanicum (growing, unlike other members of the family, upon dry hills in the neighbourhood of Oporto) such a power appears undoubtedly to exist, the people of the neighbourhood using it as a flycatcher, and hanging it upon their walls for that express purpose.

This meat-eating habit or instinct (whichever we may agree to call it) is shared to a greater or less extent by all the Droseraceæ, such as the Venus’s fly-trap, the Byblis gigantea of Australia, and a small but curious aquatic cousin, known to botanists by the formidable name of Aldrovanda vesiculosa, whose tiny leaves have the power of shutting vice-like over every unfortunate insect which approaches them, and which thus finds itself enclosed in a floating prison. If eminently characteristic of them, this carnivorousness is by no means confined however to the sundews, and their allies. If anything the Pinguiculas, for instance, rather exceed them in voracity. Few plants are at once so beautiful, and so interesting from the problems to which their distribution gives rise, as is the great Irish butterwort--Pinguicula grandiflora. Unknown to England and Scotland; unknown to the whole north of Europe; unknown even to the rest of Ireland; its viscid green rosettes may be seen on most of the lowlands of Kerry, and upon many of the bogs of south Cork. For nine months of the year that is all that there is to see. In June a flower-stalk rises out of the centre of the rosette, crowned with a pendulous bell of the most pellucid, the most ethereal shade of violet. Happily for the susceptibilities of the investigator this is not the flesh-eating portion of the plant, that office being strictly confined to the leaves. Stooping down and examining these leaves we find that, whereas some are flat, others are slightly dog-eared along the edges. If further we unroll a few of the dog-ears we discover the remains, not of one alone, but often of a dozen unfortunate flies and midges, in all stages of assimilation; some already half-digested, others still alive, and struggling to escape from their glutinous prison. If further we place a fragment of bone, of meat, or indeed of any nitrogenous substance, upon the edge of one of the fully expanded leaves, we shall find that little by little the leaf begins curling upwards, until the two edges approach, and then join. Finally the morsel is lost to sight, becoming entirely immersed in its bath of secretion, where it remains until all its nutritive parts are absorbed.

Viscous as the whole surface of the leaf is, it does not seem as if this process of digestion was carried on with the same rapidity in the centre as at the sides, and, as there are in this case no long hairs to act as locomotive organs, it often happens that one may see flies and other small insects lying partially dried up and useless in the centre of the leaf. In one respect this viscidity appears at first sight to be inconvenient, the entire surface of the leaf being often covered with twigs, leaves, particles of boggy fibre, and such-like matters, which the plant has apparently no power of getting rid of. In the end this may prove however to be an advantage rather than otherwise, since it has been ascertained that the Pinguiculas feed, not alone on animal, but also on vegetable substances; the extreme stickiness of the leaves causes them moreover to act as a chevaux-de-frise, thus hindering small but industrious ants from making their way up the flower-stalks to the corolla.

Yet another little group of bog-plants, namely, the Utricularias, or bladderworts, are meat eaters. In their case the fly-catching apparatus is situated, not in the leaves, but in certain small attached air-bladders, which are constructed almost exactly upon the principle of an eel-trap, and which, if opened, may generally be found to contain flies. Thus we see how discovery may be anticipated, and how one of man’s most boasted attributes--that of the Destroyer--may be wrested from him by a miserable little green bog-weed! Before the first Celtic hunter flung spear at wolf or stag; before the Firbolgs, or the Tuatha-da-Daanans--cunning workers and craftsmen--had set up any gins or traps in the wilderness; before the first monk or abbot had arranged ingeniously devised weirs, wherein the salmon--seemingly by miracle--rang a bell to announce its own arrival; before any of these things had been done, or thought of, little Utricularia minor and little Utricularia intermedia had set up their own primitive green eel-traps in the yet unvisited wastes of Iar-Connaught.

MAY 5, 1900

Few events are more gratifying than to find oneself taken more seriously by other people than by oneself, and I am pleased therefore to discover that our palpably artificial little pond has been taken possession of by a colony of frogs, which must have travelled some distance to make its acquaintance, frog-haunted ponds or even ditches being by no means abundant on these dry hillsides of ours.

I have never myself met more than one species of frog in these islands. Professor Bell, however, speaks of another, Rana Scotica, which he held to be distinct, but the difference seems to be mainly one of size. It is extremely difficult to persuade anyone who has noticed the multitudes of frogs which swarm in Ireland that they were only introduced there artificially, and as lately as the beginning of last century. Such, nevertheless, is the fact, and the date of the event is, moreover, a tolerably fixed one. It was a Dr. Gunthers, or Guithers, who, in the year 1705, turned out a handful of spawn into a ditch near Trinity College. For some years the frogs appear to have contented themselves with the neighbourhood of that University, but sixteen years later, in 1721, they were found forty miles away, from which point they seem to have rapidly extended themselves over the whole island. Incidentally the fact is confirmed by a great, if hardly a zoological authority, namely, Dean Swift. In his Considerations about Maintaining the Poor, which appeared in the year 1726, in the course of thundering against certain fire offices, which had the impertinence to be English, he declares that “their marks upon our houses spread faster and further than a colony of frogs.” The portent, therefore, it is plain, had reached his ears.