The Romance of Plant Life
But there are enormous differences in different kinds of woods. The colour of wood varies from white (Beech), yellow (Satinwood), lemon-yellow and bluish red (sap and heartwood of Barberry), to dark and light brown mottled (Olive), black (Persimmon), and dark brown (Walnut). Some woods have a distinct smell or perfume. Cedarwood, Sandalwood, Deal, and Teak, are all distinctly fragrant. The Stinkwood of South Africa and the Til of Madeira have an unpleasant smell.
More important in practice are the differences in the hardness and weight of wood. The Ironwood of India cannot be worked, as its hardness blunts every tool. It requires a pressure of something like 16,000 lb. to force a square-inch punch to a depth of one-twentieth of an inch in Lignum vitæ. Even Hickory and Oak (if of good quality) require a pressure of 3200 lb. to the square inch to do this. On the other hand the Cotton tree of India (Bombax malabaricum) has exceedingly soft wood. It is quite easy to drive a pin into the wood with the fingers.
Some woods are far too heavy to float: many tropical woods are especially very weighty. Perhaps the Black Ironwood, of which a cubic foot weighs 85 lb., is the heaviest of all. But the same volume of Poplar, Willow, or Spruce does not weigh more than 24 lb.
There are many ancient and modern instances of the extraordinary way in which timber lasts when at all carefully looked after. Thus the Cedar which "Hiram rafted down" to make the temple of Solomon (probably Cedar of Lebanon) seems to have been extraordinarily durable. Pliny says that the beams of the temple of Apollo at Utica were sound 1200 years after they were erected.
Cypress wood (Cupressus sempervirens) was often used to make chests for clothes because the clothes moth cannot penetrate it, and it also lasts a very long time. There is a chest of this wood in the South Kensington Museum which is 600-700 years old. The Cypresswood gates of Constantinople were eleven centuries old when they were destroyed by the Turks in 1453. The fleet of Alexander the Great, and the bridge over the Euphrates built by Semiramis, were made of Cypress. This wood seems to have been of extraordinary value to the ancients, and was used for mummy cases in Egypt, for coffins by the Popes, as well as for harps and organ pipes.22
Perhaps the most valuable woods are Box, which is used for woodcuts, and Walnut, which used to be highly prized for gun-stocks, as much as £600 having been paid for a single tree.
But the most interesting histories of trade in timber belong to the commoner and more usual woods. The great woods of Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) cover 14,000 square miles of Australia, but they are being rapidly cut down and sawn up into small blocks to be carried right across the world in order to form the pavement which London cabmen and cab-horses prefer to any other.
One remembers also the beautiful Deodar forests of Afghanistan, and the Himalayas. Logs of deodar were floated down the rivers to form bridges or temple pillars in Srinagar, the capital of far Cashmere. Nowadays great "slides" are made, winding down into the valleys from the recesses of the hills. When winter approaches, water is sprinkled on the logs which make the slide; this freezes and forms a slippery descending surface, down which the deodar timber rushes till it reaches the low ground, where it is cut up into railway sleepers and takes part in the civilizing of India.
The fragrant Teak has an oleoresin which prevents the destructive white ants from attacking it; it is the most valuable timber for shipbuilding, and grows in many places of India, Malaysia, Java, and Sumatra. It floats down the rivers of Burmah, coming from the most remote hill jungles, and elephants are commonly used at the ports to gather the trunks from the water and pile them ready for shipment.
The Birch is carried all the way from Russia to Assam and Ceylon, in order to make the chests in which tea is sent to England and Russia (native Indian woods are also used). It is also used in the distillation of Scotch whisky, for smoking herrings and hams, for clogs, baskets, tanning, dyeing, cordage, and even for making bread.
But one of the most curious and interesting sights in any seaport is sure to be an old white Norwegian or Swedish sailing barque or brigantine. She will have a battered, storm-beaten appearance, and is yet obviously a comfortable home. The windows of the deck-house may be picked out with a lurid green. The tall, slowmoving, white-bearded skipper and his wife, children, and crew, not to speak of a dog and cats, have their home on this veteran "windjammer." She carries them from some unpronounceable, never-heard-of port in Norway, all over the world. You may see her discharging a cargo of deal plank, through the clumsy square holes in her stern, in a forgotten Fifeshire village, in Madagascar, in China, or in the Straits of Magellan. All her life she is engaged in this work, and her life is an exceedingly long one, to judge from the Viking lines on which she is built.
Moreover, her work is done so economically that it used to be much cheaper to use her cargo in Capetown than to utilize the beautiful forests of the Knysna and King Williamstown.
But there are not wanting signs that the forests of Norway, of Sweden, and even those of the United States, are doomed.
It is said that seven acres of primeval forest are cut down to supply the wood which is used up in making the paper required for one day's issue of a certain New York journal. What a responsibility and a source of legitimate pride this must be to the journalists! Let us hope that the end justifies the means.
Boulger calculates that in 1884 all the available timber from 4,131,520 acres of Californian Redwood was used in making the sleepers of the railways then existing in the United States.
He finds that no less than 18,000,000 acres of forest are necessary to keep up the supply of sleepers for the old lines and to build new ones.
So that, if we remember the wood required for paper, firewood, and the thousand other important requisites of civilized man, the United States must soon exhaust her supply and import wood.
Then will come the opportunity of British North America. The Southern forest of Canada, which extended for 2000 miles from the Atlantic to the head of the St. Lawrence, has indeed gone or is disappearing into pulpwood and timber, but there is still the great Northern forest from the Straits of Belleisle to Alaska (4000 miles long and 700 miles broad), and in addition the beautiful forests of Douglas Spruce and other trees in British Columbia covering 285,000 square miles.
It is the wood-pulp industry which is at present destroying the Canadian forests. The penny and halfpenny papers, and indeed most books nowadays, are made of paper produced by disintegrating wood: it is cheap, and can be produced in huge quantities; nevertheless it is disquieting to reflect that probably nineteen-twentieths of the literary output of the twentieth century will be dust and ashes just about the same time (some fifty years) that the writers who produced it reach the same state.23
Yet, considering the amount daily produced to-day, the future readers of fifty years hence who are now in their cradles, may consider this a merciful dispensation of Providence.
One very curious use of wood may be mentioned here. Near Assouan, on the First Cataract of the Nile, one discovers broken granite or syenite needles, which had been intended by the ancient Egyptians for monuments. Where the broken pillar lies, there are rows of wedge-shaped holes cut in the rock.
They used to drive in wedges of dry wood and then wet them with water. The expansion of the wood split the rock, though this is hard granite or syenite. Very often the process failed because the stone cracked. The same method is said to be still used in some quarries.
The destruction of the forest is really necessary. Most of the corn land and rich pasture of the world has been at one time forest. It could scarcely be such fertile soil if it had not been for the many years during which leaf-mould fell on it, and the roots broke up and penetrated the subsoil below. Canada, Russia, and the United States are now passing through the same experience as that of Great Britain in the time of the Romans, Saxons, and Danes.
But there is terrible waste by fire.
When the trees become dry and withered in the height of summer in either India or the United States, some careless tramp may throw aside a lighted match. If a fire once starts, it spreads with enormous rapidity; great clouds of smoke roll over the surrounding country, and every village sounds the alarm. Everybody rushes to help and try to stop the conflagration, or if too late hurriedly saves whatever he can get of his possessions. His log hut and all the accumulations of years of saving may be turned into a heap of ashes in a very few minutes.
But the crackling of the leaves and the flaming twigs and scorching bark make such a volume of fire that nothing which man can do is of any avail.
Of course every beast, every bird and insect is in the greatest possible danger.
This is how a fire in New Zealand has been described by Mr. William Satchell: —24
"For a while it seemed that the battle must go to the wind, the fiery monster withdrew, lay hidden, roaring angrily in the dry heart of the woods; then insidiously he stretched forth his glittering arms, first one, then another, and locking the shuddering trees in an irresistible embrace, sprang once again erect. In an instant the whole bush from edge to edge became a seething, rocking mass of flames.
"'Fire! Fire!'
"Then, insignificant no longer, transfigured rather beyond all living possibilities of loveliness, the bush stood revealed to its centre. It became less a fire than an incandescence, waxing in brilliance to the point when, as it seemed, it must perforce burst into indistinguishable flame. Every leaf and twig of that fairy forest was wrought and hammered in virgin gold, every branch and trunk was a carved miracle of burnished copper. And from the golden leaves to the golden floor, floatingly or swiftly, there fell an unceasing rain of crimson flame petals, gorgeous flame fruits. Depth after depth stood revealed, each transcending the last in loveliness. And as the eye sought to penetrate those magic interiors there seemed to open out yet farther vistas, beyond belief beautiful, as of the streets of a city incorruptible, walled and towered, lost in the light of a golden incomparable star."
"'Fire! Fire!'
"In the face of that vision of glory the cry rang out with all the ineptitude and inappropriateness of the human weakling. On one side the titanic forces of nature, inexorable, eternal; on the other the man, frail of body, the creature of an hour, matching himself against them.
"'Fire! Fire!'
"Sheltering his face from the insufferable heat, the Swede hammered madly at the solid house-door. At the back, now utterly unapproachable, the kitchen, the roof, and a part of the main wall were already in flames. A few minutes – five at the most – would complete the demolition of the house. To right and left the great trees one after another went off like rockets, the roar of their burning foliage shaking the very earth. A deafening crashing of falling timber came at intervals from the bush beyond."
In some countries the destruction of the forests has had a very serious effect on the climate. The rain which falls upon a forest is partly absorbed by the leaves, and but a very small part of it is carried off by burns and streams: most sinks down into the forest soil, and is only gradually given back again after being taken in by the tree roots and evaporated by the leaves.
But bare hills denuded of wood allow most of their rain to rush down to the sea in dangerous spates of the rivers and burns, and then the ground becomes afterwards very dry and burnt up. There are very many countries now barren and desolate because they have been robbed of the beautiful forests which once covered the springheads and mountain valleys.
Perhaps Palestine is one of the worst instances. But it is when we remember Babylon, Nineveh, and all the cities of the coast of Asia Minor, as they were even a thousand years ago, and compare their present barren, desolate condition, that the full meaning of mountain forests becomes clear.
Where once there were thriving, prosperous cities with enormous populations, now the goats graze or a few miserable peasants carefully husband the water of a few miserable streams. The same thing has happened in Mauritius, in the Cape Verde and Canary Islands, and in many other places.
But men are now beginning to see how dangerous the destruction of forests may be, and in many countries and especially in Britain, new forests are being planted. Perhaps in time we may grow in Britain so much timber that we shall gain something like £32,000,000 a year, which is what we spend on imported woods.
At present plover, whaups, snipe, and grouse, or useless red deer, inhabit what was once the Caledonian forest, and every thousand acres of such land nowadays supports perhaps one shepherd and half a gamekeeper. But when it is planted again with woodlands it will afford a living to at least ten foresters, 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 below. It is then blown away by the wind on a fine dry day, but it is not allowed to get out in wet weather. It is said that vast clouds of pine pollen occur in America, and that the water of certain lakes becomes quite yellow and discoloured by it at certain seasons. Each little particle of pollen has two minute caps or air-balloons which give it buoyancy, so that it can float easily immense distances.
A curious little herb, the Wall Pellitory, and another foreign species, the Artillery plant, produces small explosions of pollen. When it is touched, there is a little puff or cloud of dusty pollen. Even the common Nettle does the same on fine dry days when it is in full flower.
But of course this carrying of pollen by the wind is a very expensive arrangement. It is so much a matter of pure chance that a grain arrives at its right destination. Suppose that a flower is giving out clouds of pollen, then the chance of a pollen grain reaching a female flower only five feet away is very small, even if the stigma of the female flower is a quarter of an inch in diameter. The chance of pollen reaching it will only be about 1 to 1440; 1439 pollen grains will be wasted26 for every one that reaches the stigma. But even this is not quite a fair calculation, for if the female flower is not down wind, none will reach it at all!
But if an insect goes to the catkin of an alder or any other male flower, it will see the red points of the stigma and will very likely go there at once. This shows how much more reasonable and efficient insects will be.
The immense majority of flowers are, in fact, purple, blue, red, yellow, or white, so that they are conspicuous, and stand clearly out against the green of their leaves. It is well known to all who have arranged flowers for the table that the green of the leaves of different plants varies greatly in its shade and tint. Many greens do not match special flowers at all, but it is the fact that the green of any one plant is always quite harmonious, and agrees well with its own flowers!
Besides varied and beautiful colours, sweet or strong scents and supplies of honey or nectar are provided for insects.
How did flowers manage to produce all these attractions? No one has answered that question. We know in a general sort of way that the parts of flowers are modified leaves, and that petals and stamens become yellowish or pure white because they do not form green colouring matter like ordinary leaves.
It is also known that on the Alps or on any high mountain, where the air is pure and the sun strong, flowers become rich, brilliant, and vivid. In such places as the "Jardin" near Mont Blanc, the pure, deep, rich blue of gentians, the crimsons, reds, and purples of other flowers, impress the most casual and unobservant traveller. "White and red, yellow and blue, brown and green stand side by side on a hand's breadth of space." In that strong mountain air, also, perfumes are stronger, purer, and of finer quality than in the lowlands. There is a more intense, active, and vigorous life going on in flowers than is required by the more prosaic industries in other parts of a plant. Flowers also often live at a higher temperature than the surrounding air.