Proserpina Volume II Part 8

Root branched, and enormous in proportion to plant, and I fancy therefore must be good for something if one knew it. But Gerarde, who calls the plant Red Rattle, (it having indeed much in common with the Yellow Rattle), says, "It groweth in moist and moorish meadows; the herbe is not only unprofitable, but likewise hurtful, and an infirmity of the meadows."

(3) Pal.u.s.tris, D. 2055, S. 996--scarcely any likeness between the plates.

"Everywhere in the meadows," according to D. I leave the English name, Marsh Monacha, much doubting its being more marshy than others.

12. I take next (4 and 5) two northern species, Lapponica, D. 2, and Gronlandica, D. 1166; the first yellow, the second red, both beautiful. The Lap one has its divided leaves almost united into one lovely spear-shaped, single leaf. The Greenland one has its red hood much prolonged in front.

(6) Ramosa, also a Greenland species; yellow, very delicate and beautiful.

Three stems from one root, but may be more or fewer, I suppose.

13. (7) Norvegica, a beautifully cl.u.s.tered golden flower, with thick stem.

D. 30, the only locality given being the Dovrefeldt. "Alpina" and "Flammea"

are the synonyms, but I do not know it on the Alps, and it is no more flame-coloured than a cowslip.

Both the Lapland and Norwegian flowers are drawn with their stems wavy, though upright--a rare and pretty habit of growth.

14. (8) Suecica, D. 26, named awkwardly Sceptrum Carolinum, in honour of Charles XII. It is the largest of all the species drawn in D., and contrasts strikingly with (4) and (5) in the strict uprightness of its stem. The corolla is closed at the extremity, which is red; the body of the flower pale yellow. Grows in marshy and shady woods, near Upsal. Linn., Flora Suecica, 553.

The many-lobed but united leaves, at the root five or six inches long, are irregularly beautiful.

15. These eight species are all I can specify, having no pictures of the others named by Loudon,--eleven, making nineteen altogether, and I wish I could find a twentieth and draw them all, but the reader may be well satisfied if he clearly know these eight. The group they form is an entirely distinct one, exactly intermediate between the Vestals and Draconids, and cannot be rightly attached to either; for it is Draconid in structure and affinity--Vestal in form--and I don't see how to get the connection of the three families rightly expressed without taking the Draconidae out of the groups belonging to the dark Kora, and placing them next the Vestals, with the Monachae between; for indeed Linaria and several other Draconid forms are entirely innocent and beautiful, and even the Foxglove never does any real mischief like hemlock, while decoratively it is one of the most precious of mountain flowers. I find myself also embarra.s.sed by my name of Vestals, because of the masculine groups of Basil and Thymus, and I think it will be better to call them simply Menthae, and to place them with the other cottage-garden plants not yet cla.s.sed, taking the easily remembered names Mentha, Monacha, Draconida. This will leave me a blank seventh place among my twelve orders at p. 194, vol. i., which I think I shall fill by taking cyclamen and anagillis out of the Primulaceae, and making a separate group of them. These retouchings and changes are inevitable in a work confessedly tentative and suggestive only; but in whatever state of imperfection I may be forced to leave 'Proserpina,' it will a.s.suredly be found, up to the point reached, a better foundation for the knowledge of flowers in the minds of young people than any hitherto adopted system of nomenclature.

16. Taking then this re-arranged group, Mentha, Monacha, and Draconida, as a sufficiently natural and convenient one, I will briefly give the essentially botanical relations of the three families.

Mentha and Monacha agree in being essentially hooded flowers, the upper petal more or less taking the form of a cup, helmet or hood, which conceals the tops of the stamens. Of the three lower petals, the lowest is almost invariably the longest; it sometimes is itself divided again into two, but may be best thought of as single, and with the two lateral ones, distinguished in the Menthae as the ap.r.o.n and the side pockets.

Plate XII. represents the most characteristic types of the blossoms of Menthae, in the profile and front views, all a little magnified. The upper two are white basil, purple spotted--growing here at Brantwood always with two terminal flowers. The two middle figures are the purple-spotted dead nettle, Lamium maculatum; and the two lower, thyme: but I have not been able to draw these as I wanted, the perspectives of the petals being too difficult, and inexplicable to the eye even in the flowers themselves without continually putting them in changed positions.

17. The Menthae are in their structure essentially quadrate plants; their stems are square, their leaves opposite, their stamens either four or two, their seeds two-carpeled. But their calices are five-sepaled, falling into divisions of two and three; and the flowers, though essentially four-petaled, may divide either the upper or lower petal, or both, into two lobes, and so present a six-lobed outline. The entire plants, but chiefly the leaves, are nearly always fragrant, and always innocent. None of them sting, none p.r.i.c.k, and none poison.

18. The Draconids, easily recognizable by their aspect, are botanically indefinable with any clearness or simplicity. The calyx may be five- or four-sepaled; the corolla, five- or four-lobed; the stamens may be two, four, four with a rudimentary fifth, or five with the two anterior ones longer than the other three! The capsule may open by two, three, or four valves,--or by pores; the seeds, generally numerous, are sometimes solitary, and the leaves may be alternate, opposite, or verticillate.

19. Thus licentious in structure, they are also doubtful in disposition.

None that I know of are fragrant, few useful, many more or less malignant, and some parasitic. The following piece of a friend's letter almost makes me regret my rescue of them from the dark kingdom of Kora:--

"... And I find that the Monacha Rosea (Red Rattle is its name, besides the ugly one) is a perennial, and several of the other draconidae, foxglove, etc., are biennials, born this year, flowering and dying next year, and the size of roots is generally proportioned to the life of plants; except when artificial cultivation develops the root specially, as in turnips, etc. Several of the Draconidae are parasites, and suck the roots of other plants, and have only just enough of their own to catch with. The Yellow Rattle is one; it clings to the roots of the gra.s.ses and clovers, and no cultivation will make it thrive without them. My authority for this last fact is Grant Allen; but I have observed for myself that the Yellow Rattle has very small _white_ sucking roots, and no earth sticking to them. The toothworts and broom rapes are Draconidae, I think, and wholly parasites. Can it be that the Red Rattle is the one member of the family that has 'proper pride, and is self supporting'? the others are mendicant orders. We had what we choose to call the Dorcas flower show yesterday, and we gave, as usual, prizes for wild flower bouquets. I tried to find out the local names of several flowers, but they all seemed to be called 'I don't know, ma'am.' I would not allow this name to suffice for the red poppy, and I said 'This red flower _must_ be called _something_--tell me what you call it?' A few of the audience answered 'Blind Eyes.' Is it because they have to do with sleep that they are called Blind Eyes--or because they are dazzling?"

20. I think, certainly, from the dazzling, which sometimes with the poppy, scarlet geranium, and nasturtium, is more distinctly oppressive to the eye than a real excess of light.

I will certainly not include among my rescued Draconidae, the parasitic Lathraea and Orobanche; and cannot yet make certain of any minor cla.s.sification among those which I retain,--but, uniting Bartsia with Euphrasia, I shall have, in the main, the three divisions Digitalis, Linaria, Euphrasia, and probably separate the moneyworts as links with Veronica, and Rhinanthus as links with Lathraea.

And as I shall certainly be unable this summer, under the pressure of resumed work at Oxford, to spend time in any new botanical investigations, I will rather try to fulfil the promise given in the last number, to collect what little I have been able hitherto to describe or ascertain, respecting the higher modes of tree structure.

CHAPTER VII.

SCIENCE IN HER CELLS.

[The following chapter has been written six years. It was delayed in order to complete the promised clearer a.n.a.lysis of stem-structure; which, after a great deal of chopping, chipping, and peeling of my oaks and birches, came to reverently hopeless pause. What is here done may yet have some use in pointing out to younger students how they may simplify their language, and direct their thoughts, so as to attain, in due time, to reverent hope.]

1. The most generally useful book, to myself, hitherto, in such little time as I have for reading about plants, has been Lindley's 'Ladies' Botany'; but the most rich and true I have yet found in ill.u.s.tration, the 'Histoire des Plantes,'[35] by Louis Figuier. I should like those of my readers who can afford it to buy both these books; the first named, at any rate, as I shall always refer to it for structural drawings, and on points of doubtful cla.s.sification; while the second contains much general knowledge, expressed with some really human intelligence and feeling; besides some good and singularly _just_ history of botanical discovery and the men who guided it.

The botanists, indeed, tell me proudly, "Figuier is no authority." But who wants authority! Is there nothing known yet about plants, then, which can be taught to a boy or girl, without referring them to an 'authority'?

I, for my own part, care only to gather what Figuier can teach concerning things visible, to any boy or girl, who live within reach of a bramble hedge, or a hawthorn thicket, and can find authority enough for what they are told, in the sticks of them.

2. If only _he_ would, or could, tell us clearly that much; but like other doctors, though with better meaning than most, he has learned mainly to look at things with a microscope,--rarely with his eyes. And I am sorry to see, on re-reading this chapter of my own, which is little more than an endeavour to a.n.a.lyze and arrange the statements contained in his second, that I have done it more petulantly and unkindly than I ought; but I can't do all the work over again, now,--more's the pity. I have not looked at this chapter for a year, and shall be sixty before I know where I am;--(I find myself, instead, now, sixty-four!)

3. But I stand at once partly corrected in this second chapter of Figuier's, on the 'Tige,' French from the Latin 'Tignum,' which 'authorities' say is again from the Sanscrit, and means 'the thing hewn with an axe'; anyhow it is modern French for what we are to call the stem (-- 12, p. 136).

"The tige," then, begins M. Louis, "is the axis of the ascending system of a vegetable, and it is garnished at intervals with vital knots, (eyes,) from which spring leaves and buds, disposed in a perfectly regular order.

The root presents nothing of the kind. This character permits us always to distinguish, in the vegetable axis, what belongs really to the stem, and what to the root."

4. Yes; and that is partly a new idea to me, for in this power of _a.s.signing their order_ for the leaves, the stem seems to take a royal or commandant character, and cannot be merely defined as the connexion of the leaf with the roots.

In _it_ is put the spirit of determination. One cannot fancy the little leaf, as it is born, determining the point it will be born at: the governing stem must determine that for it. Also the disorderliness of the root is to be noted for a condition of its degradation, no less than its love, and need, of Darkness.

Nor was I quite right (above, -- 15, p. 139) in calling the stem _itself_ 'spiral': it is itself a straight-growing rod, but one which, as it grows, lays the buds of future leaves round it in a spiral order, like the bas-relief on Trajan's column.

I go on with Figuier: the next pa.s.sage is very valuable.

5. "The tige is the part of plants which, directed into the air, supports, and _gives growing power to_, the branches, the twigs, the leaves, and the flowers. The form, strength, and direction of the tige depend on the part that each plant has to play among the vast vegetable population of our globe. Plants which need for their life a pure and often-renewed air, are borne by a straight tige, robust and tall. When they have need only of a moist air, more condensed, and more rarely renewed, when they have to creep on the ground or glide in thickets, the tiges are long, flexible, and dragging. If they are to float in the air, sustaining themselves on more robust vegetables, they are provided with flexible, slender, and supple tiges."

6. Yes; but in that last sentence he loses hold of his main idea, and to me the important one,--namely, the connexion of the form of stem with the quality of the air it requires. And that idea itself is at present vague, though most valuable, to me. A strawberry creeps, with a flexible stem, but requires certainly no less pure air than a wood-fungus, which stands up straight. And in our own hedges and woods, are the wild rose and honeysuckle signs of unwholesome air?

"And honeysuckle loved to crawl Up the lone crags and ruined wall.

I deemed such nooks the sweetest shade The sun in all his round surveyed."

It seems to me, in the nooks most haunted by honeysuckle in my own wood, that the reason for its twining is a very feminine one,--that it likes to twine; and that all these whys and wherefores resolve themselves at last into--what a modern philosopher, of course, cannot understand--caprice.[36]

7. Farther on, Figuier, quoting St. Hilaire, tells us, of the creepers in primitive forests,--"Some of them resemble waving ribands, others coil themselves and describe vast spirals; they droop in festoons, they wind hither and thither among the trees, they fling themselves from one to another, and form ma.s.ses of leaves and flowers in which the observer is often at a loss to discover on which plant each several blossom grows."

For all this, the real reasons will be known only when human beings become reasonable. For, except a curious naturalist or wistful missionary, no Christian has trodden the labyrinths of delight and decay among these garlands, but men who had no other thought than how to cheat their savage people out of their gold, and give them gin and smallpox in exchange. But, so soon as true servants of Heaven shall enter these Edens, and the Spirit of G.o.d enter with them, another spirit will also be breathed into the physical air; and the stinging insect, and venomous snake, and poisonous tree, pa.s.s away before the power of the regenerate human soul.

8. At length, on the structure of the tige, Figuier begins his real work, thus:---

"A glance of the eye, thrown on the section of a log of wood destined for warming, permits us to recognize that the tige of the trees of our forests presents three essential parts, which are, in going from within to without, the pith, the wood, and the bark. The pith, (in French, marrow,) forms a sort of column in the centre of the woody axis. In very thick and old stems its diameter appears very little; and it has even for a long time been supposed that the marrow ends by disappearing altogether from the stems of old trees. But it does nothing of the sort;[37] and it is now ascertained, by exact measures, that its diameter remains sensibly invariable[38] from the moment when the young woody axis begins to consolidate itself, to the epoch of its most complete development."

So far, so good; but what does he mean by the complete development of the young _woody_ axis? When does the axis become 'wooden,' and how far up the tree does he call it an axis? If the stem divides into three branches, which is the axis? And is the pith in the trunk no thicker than in each branch?

9. He proceeds to tell us, "The marrow is formed by a reunion of cells."--Yes, and so is Newgate, and so was the Bastille. But what does it matter whether the marrow is made of a reunion of cells, or cellars, or walls, or floors, or ceilings? I want to know what's the use of it? why doesn't it grow bigger with the rest of the tree? when _does_ the tree 'consolidate itself'? when is it finally consolidated? and how can there be always marrow in it when the weary frame of its age remains a mere scarred tower of war with the elements, full of dust and bats?

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 24.]

'He will tell you if only you go on patiently,' thinks the reader. He will not! Once your modern botanist gets into cells, he stays in them. Hear how he goes on!--"This cell is a sort of sack; this sack is completely closed; sometimes it is empty, sometimes it"--is full?--no, that would be unscientific simplicity: sometimes it "conceals a matter in its interior."

"The marrow of young trees, such as it is represented in Figure 24 (Figuier, Figs. 38, 39, p. 42), is nothing else"--(indeed!)--"than an aggregation of cells, which, first of spherical form, have become polyhedric by their increase and mutual compression."

10. Now these figures, 38 and 39, which profess to represent this change, show us sixteen oval cells, such as at A, (Fig. 24) enlarged into thirteen larger, and flattish, hexagons!--B, placed at a totally different angle.

And before I can give you the figure revised with any available accuracy, I must know why or how the cells are enlarged, and in what direction.