The Romance of Plant Life. Elliot George Francis Scott
and surely a whole gamekeeper as well.
In the lowlands of Scotland and in England one often discovers, in walking over the hills, remains of cottages and farmhouses which have now vanished. The people have gone into the towns, and the healthy yeomen and farmers' boys have become weak-chested factory hands and hooligans. Such sites of old farms can often be recognized by a patch of nettles, and especially by eight or nine ash trees. These were always planted near the houses to give a ready supply of wood for spears. The ash, "for nothing ill," as Spenser puts it, would be available also for repairing the handles of tools, carts, etc. Some authorities say that it was the law of Scotland that these eight or nine ash trees should be planted at every "farmtoon."
So also, when forests began to vanish in England, laws were made to the effect that yew trees should be planted in every village churchyard. Probably this was to ensure a good supply of bows for the English archers, who, like the Scottish spears, were the best soldiers of their kind in Europe.
So that if we try to compare the conditions of man and of the forests in Great Britain from the earliest days, it would be something like this: —
1. When the earliest inhabitants lived on shell-fish, seabirds' eggs, nuts, and fruits, almost the whole country was covered by oak, Scotch fir, or birch forests.
2. When man was a hunter of reindeer and other deer, horses, cattle, and birds, he used much wood for fires and for building his lake dwellings.
3. When man kept herds of swine to eat acorns, black cattle, goats, and ponies, there would be many clearings and a great deal of open wood in which the cattle roamed about.
4. When man grew corn and other plants, the forest vanished altogether. Dr. Johnson said he scarcely saw a tree between Carlisle and Edinburgh. Yet first the King, then the Barons, had their parks and woodlands for preserving game. Moreover, the yews in the churchyards of England, and the ash trees by the Scotch farmtoons and peel-towers, were carefully looked after.
5. When great towns arose, and men became factory hands and steel workers, rich men began to make plantations in the lowlands, and to use the depopulated highlands for grouse moors and deer forests.
6. When men become wiser than they are now, it will be seen that great forests are necessary on all waste-land and barren places, both to keep a healthy country population and because it will pay.
CHAPTER V
FLOWERS
Man's ideas of the use of flowers – Sprengel's great discovery – Insects, not man, consulted – Pollen carried to set seed – Flowers and insects of the Whinstone Age – Coal Age flowers – Monkey-puzzle times – Chalk flowers – Wind-blown pollen – Extravagant expenditure of pollen in them – Flower of the pine – Exploding flowers – Brilliant alpines – Intense life in flowers – Colour contrasts – Lost bees – Evening flowers – Humming birds and sunbirds – Kangaroo – Floral clocks – Ages of flowers – How to get flowers all the year round – Ingenious contrivances – Yucca and fig – Horrible-smelling flowers – Artistic tastes of birds, insects, and man.
FOR many centuries flowers were considered as pleasing and attractive decorations stuck about the world in the same way as they are put in a drawing-room in order to give people pleasure. Very soon they were found to be extremely useful in poetry, sometimes to point a moral or disguise a sermon, like the primrose in Peter Bell, but more generally to produce a good impression on the BELOVED OBJECT. Burns puts the usual view of flowers very nicely in the following: "But I will down yon river rove amang the woods sae green, and a' to pu' a posie to my ain dear May." Possibly this is the meaning also in the exquisite lines of Shakespeare about the pansy: —
"Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower, —
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound, —
And maidens call it, love-in-idleness."
Even if there is no particular meaning, the "little western flower" gives point and beauty to the lines.
People only began to understand flowers about the year 1793, when Christian Conrad Sprengel, Rector of Spandau, near Berlin, published a very interesting work. He had discovered that the beauty of flowers and their colour and shape were by no means intended solely to please human eyes, but that they were designed to attract and allure the eyes of insects. Before his time there had been many guesses. Indeed, Theophrastus (born 371 B.C., and often mentioned in this work) seems to have quite well understood why flowers produce pollen, and that the fruit would not set and form seed unless pollen was carried to the female part of the flower. He mentions that the Pistacio has both male and female plants, and that Palms only form dates when the pollen is carried to the female tree. This experiment with the Date-palm was tried in 1592 by an Italian (Alpino) in an Egyptian tour, and the Englishman, Jacob Bobart, the Pole, Adam Zaluzianski (the latter in the same year) confirmed the general idea. Then in the year 1694 Rudolp Jacob Camerarius, a German, carried on a few more experiments, but no real definite advance was made until 1793, in the very midst of the French Revolution.25
The great point of Sprengel's discovery was in its being an intelligible explanation of the reason why flowers have bright colours, scent, and honey. At his time and indeed for many years afterwards, botanists looked on the stamens, petals, and other parts of the flower exactly in the way that a stamp collector looks at punctures and postmarks, that is without thinking about their meaning. Now we find that they are always designed to fulfil a perfectly definite purpose, and that all their details are contrived accordingly.
This purpose is to carry the pollen from the stamens of one flower to the stigma of another. The pollen can usually be recognized as a yellowish or reddish dust formed in the stamens; this dust is generally rubbed off on an insect's proboscis or on part of its body. When the insect reaches another flower the pollen is scraped off by a sticky or gummy stigmatic surface. When the pollen has been placed on this surface it grows, germinates, and part of it unites with the egg-cell of the young seed.
The latter is then, and not till then, able to become ripe and mature. It may be compared to cross-breeding in animals, though the process does not exactly correspond.
But all flowers do not require insects to carry their pollen. In early geological periods we do not find any flowers like those that now exist, nor in those early times were there any flies, bees, or butterflies.
The cockroach seems to have existed in Silurian (whinstone) times, and many gigantic and extraordinary insects lived in those damp forests of ferns, club-moss, and horsetails, of which the remains now form our British coalfields. Mayflies, plantbugs, and especially dragonflies (some of them with wings two feet across) existed, but none of these insects are of much use as pollen-carriers.
Even much later on, when screw pines, monkey-puzzle trees, ginkgos, and bamboos formed the forests and woods of Europe, crickets and earwigs existed; but it is not until that geological period in which the chalk was formed (the Cretaceous age) that fossil plants like most of those now familiar to us occur. These had flowers intended for insects, and with the fossil plants we find the fossils of the insects that visited them. Bees, butterflies, and ordinary flies appeared upon the scene just as soon as there were flowers ready for them. Mr. Scudder has even found the fossils of certain plants, and with them the fossils of butterflies closely allied to the present butterflies which now live on present trees allied to those fossils!
How then was the pollen of the first flowers carried?
It was in all probability blown by the wind or carried in water. Even now poplars, alders, birches, and oaks rely chiefly upon the wind to carry their pollen. These plants were amongst the first of our modern flora to appear upon the earth. Some of them possess very neat contrivances suited to the wind. The catkins of the alder, for example, hang downwards, so that each little male flower is protected from rain by a little scale or bract above it. The pollen is very light, dusty, or powdery, so as to fly a long distance. The Scotch fir (Pinus sylvestris) has male flowers in little cones. These are upright, and the pollen of each stamen drops on to a small hollow on the top of the stamen
The historical account by Bonnier,