Part 32

The Plant That Makes Men Dumb

A plant now being cultivated in the newly established botanical garden of the University of Caracas may prove to be nature’s greatest boon to pestered husbands and harassed mothers. It is described only under the popular Spanish name of “planta del mudo.” It looks like sugar cane. According to reliable reports anybody who chews the stem is stricken dumb for 48 hours.

Other curiosities of the garden include a plant which allegedly can stimulate hair growth on bald heads and a bush whose blossoms open snow-white in the morning and turn red at noon. Here also blooms the exotic “Queen of Night,” a climbing cactus with a white flower five inches in diameter which opens at sunset and closes at sunrise.

The Scourge of the Earth: Locusts

From the days of the Hebrews prophets a visitation of locusts has been considered one of the plagues of God. A migration of millions of these grasshopper-like insects in clouds obscuring the sun leaves behind a countryside devastated as though by fire. In flight they sound like a forest fire being spread by a brisk wind. Whenever they come to earth areas of hundreds of square yards almost immediately are denuded of everything green.

In history their raids have been associated chiefly with the Near East. Quite similar creatures have caused far-reaching destruction over most of the world including the United States.

The last such phenomenon was about 1880. Since then grasshoppers have hopped, not flown. There have been some great invasions, but the insects have moved along the ground where it is easier to combat them.

The reason for the transformation was found a few years ago by entomologists. Hopping grasshoppers are changed into flying grasshoppers by heat and hunger. Grown in test cages at high temperatures and deprived of succulent green food, the insects acquired longer wings, became slimmer, and took on brighter colors.

It apparently is a curious provision of nature to preserve the grasshopper race. When on the edge of perishing, they are supplied with wings to carry them to green pastures a few hundred miles away. Lately there has been some indication that those in the western United States might again enter the flying phase in the near future. During the great drought of the early thirties there was a stimulus almost sufficient to make them undergo the complete transformation.

At present there seems little prospect that there will be another flying cloud in this part of the world. By planting cultivated crops on land formerly covered by grass, man provides good egg-laying grounds and plenty of green food.

Adequate information still is lacking on what makes grasshoppers increase and decrease. Also a mystery is the mechanism by which the harmless solitary phase is transformed into the dangerous gregarious phase. Several types occur in both phases and each can change itself into the other, altering their habits so that they attack in mass rather than as individuals.

During the late 1870s the flying clouds caused terror all over the world. In parts of Minnesota where the locusts landed they covered the ground three inches thick. Crops were destroyed throughout the prairie states.

The most remarkable incident was reported from Russia in 1878:

“A detachment of Gen. Lazeroff’s expedition against the Turcomans met with a curious misadventure near the Georgian town of Elizavetopol. A few versts from the town the soldiers encountered an army of locusts about 20 miles long and broad in proportion. The officer in charge did not like to turn back, repelled by mere insects. The soldiers soon were surrounded. The locusts appear to have mistaken them for trees and swarmed by the thousands around them—crawling over their bodies, lodging themselves in their helmets, penetrating their clothes and knapsacks, filling the barrels of their rifles and boring into their ears and noses.

“The commander gave the order for the troops to push on the double-quick for Elizavetopol, but the road was so blocked that the soldiers became frightened and, after they wavered a few minutes, a stampede took place. Led by a non-commissioned officer who had espied a village a short way from the road, the troops dashed across the fields, slipping about on the crushed and greasy bodies as if on ice. They were detained prisoners by the insects for 45 hours, and on the way to Elizavetopol found every blade of grass and green leaf destroyed.”

That same year a cross-continental train was held up for three hours near Reno, Nevada, by a host of locusts that covered the rails for several miles.

Trees Can Grow Smaller

Trees change size from hour to hour. The circumference of a tree trunk gets bigger and smaller with unpredictable perversity. For light on this phenomenon the world is indebted to Dr. John A. Small of Rutgers University.

About a decade ago tree scientists were provided with an instrument which could measure continuously the radial growth of a tree with an accuracy of a thousandth of an inch. With such an instrument it seemed plausible that it would be possible to tell just how much a tree had grown in a single day and its rates of growth in different seasons. A lot of the conclusions reached in this connection must now be discarded. The circumference of a tree certainly changes but not in a straight line. It may be bigger one day, smaller the next.

Dr. Small’s experiments were carried out with the white ash. He found that circumference changes followed yearly, monthly and even daily rhythms but the changes in the same tree might vary by as much as 200 percent when measurements were made at different times. Daily variations have shown a tendency to reach maximum readings about 6:30 a.m. and sink to minimum in the late afternoon or early evening. Eccentric jumps and drops can be found almost any time.

Underworld Cities

Seventeen-year locusts build great subterranean “cities” during their long sojourn in the earth’s depths. The years underground are by no means a resting period—an episode of being buried alive. All the time the young locusts, in various metamorphoses, are busy building and eating. The eggs of the strange insects are laid during a few weeks late in summer inside twigs. From these eggs come minute nymphs, which at once make their way into the ground. There they shed their shells and grow rapidly. Their food is juice sucked from roots. They make successive mud dwellings attached to these roots. The largest observed in the eastern United States were eighteen inches below the surface. Each was a rough ball of earth about two inches long and three-fourths of an inch wide. The ball is lined on the inside by smooth mud and contains only one nymph. Every time an individual moults and grows larger it must make a new house.

When they emerge from the last of their feeding chambers, the locusts dig rapidly upward and construct a somewhat different type of dwelling some inches below the surface. These are two-chambered, with upper and lower rooms connected by tunnels five to ten inches long. These are so ingeniously constructed, according to Dr. E. A. Andrews of Johns Hopkins University, that they provide “the advantage of safety along with quick access to the surface when the proper time comes. In the shaft the nymph climbs close to the surface or falls rapidly to the bottom to escape attacks. The lining of the shaft is smooth mud a few millimeters thick. The shafts are by no means always straight or of uniform diameter, but may be sinuous and present swollen regions.” In one area examined he found at the topsoil was such a mass of small stones and roots that the insects must actually have cut their way through roots. Large obstacles often were avoided by a change in direction.

“The chief implements used in making cavities in the earth”, according to Dr. Andrews' report, “are the big first legs. Here, as in other legs, the end segment is used chiefly in walking and may be folded down when not needed. The second segment from the tip is used to pick off particles of earth. The third segment is the largest and, like a powerful thumb, acts with the opposing second segment as a forceps to pick up pellets of earth and small stones. The minute particles picked loose from the earth are raked together by the tip segment to make a pellet, which the forceps can carry or shove into the walls of the cavity. However, all parts of the body may come into use, for the hind legs and the abdomen may help shove earth aside and the head may carry earth plastered upon it. In vertical tunnels the animal braces its legs against the sides and, if disturbed, relaxes and drops down.”

The last dwelling is large enough for the nymph to turn around inside and usually has a flattened floor. The top comes quite close to the surface without actually breaking through, leaving only a few millimeters of earth through which the insect must dig when the transmutation to an adult locust takes place. Examination of many of these tubular dwellings shows that there are no interconnections between them. Each has its own individual exit and along its course avoids contact with other chambers, although they often are very close together. This last home of the locust, before it emerges from the everlasting darkness to the world of light and quick death which is its pre-ordained destiny, is not necessarily restricted to the earth but may be contained above the surface. Aerial extensions may, in fact, be abundant and are in the form of turrets, towers, cones, chimneys, huts and adobe houses. The walls are of dense mud, not natural soil. Externally they are made of tiny mud pellets, but lined internally with the same smooth layer found in the underground dwellings.

Plants That Create Mirages

An explorer in the desolate heights of the Santa Marta mountains in northeastern Colombia, fog-wrapped and 10,000 feet above sea level, may see a flock of sheep grazing placidly among rocks ahead of him. Then, looking the other way, he may see an assembly of cowled, robed priests, apparently in the midst of some weird ecclesiastical ceremony. But when he reaches the places where he thought he saw these things there are neither sheep nor priests. He finds instead two strange varieties of the aster family, both among the real curiosities of the plant kingdom.

The vegetable sheep are bushy plants which grow on nearly barren ground near the mountain tops. The individual plant consists of thickly branched stems, about the size of a human finger, bearing many layers of leaves covered with wool-like hairs. Sometimes these leaves are so thick that the point of a pencil cannot be thrust through them. Some of the plants may be as large as a living-room sofa.