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PROSERPINA.
STUDIES OF WAYSIDE FLOWERS,
WHILE THE AIR WAS YET PURE
_AMONG THE ALPS, AND IN THE SCOTLAND AND
ENGLAND WHICH MY FATHER KNEW_.
BY
JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,
HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND SLADE PROFESSOR OF FINE ART.
"Oh--Prosérpina!
For the flowers now, which frighted, thou let'st fall
From Dis's waggon."
VOLUME I.
New York:
JOHN WILEY & SONS,
15 Astor Place.
1888.
* * * * *
Press of J. J. Little & Co.,
Astor Place, New York.
* * * * *
CONTENTS OF VOL. I
PAGE
INTRODUCTION, 1
CHAPTER I.
MOSS, 12
CHAPTER II.
THE ROOT, 26
CHAPTER III.
THE LEAF, 40
CHAPTER IV.
THE FLOWER, 64
CHAPTER V.
PAPAVER RHOEAS, 86
CHAPTER VI.
THE PARABLE OF JOASH, 106
CHAPTER VII.
THE PARABLE OF JOTHAM, 117
CHAPTER VIII.
THE STEM, 127
CHAPTER IX.
OUTSIDE AND IN, 151
CHAPTER X.
THE BARK, 170
CHAPTER XI.
GENEALOGY, 176
CHAPTER XII.
CORA AND KRONOS, 205
CHAPTER XIII.
THE SEED AND HUSK, 219
CHAPTER XIV.
THE FRUIT GIFT, 227
INDEX I.
DESCRIPTIVE NOMENCLATURE, 239
INDEX II.
ENGLISH NAMES, 255
INDEX III.
LATIN OR GREEK NAMES, 258
* * * * *
{1}
PROSERPINA.
INTRODUCTION.
BRANTWOOD, _14th March, 1874._
Yesterday evening I was looking over the first book in which I studied
Botany,--Curtis's Magazine, published in 1795 at No. 3, St. George's
Crescent, Blackfriars Road, and sold by the principal booksellers in Great
Britain and Ireland. Its plates are excellent, so that I am always glad to
find in it the picture of a flower I know. And I came yesterday upon what I
suppose to be a variety of a favourite flower of mine, called, in Curtis,
"the St. Bruno's Lily."
I am obliged to say "what I suppose to be a variety," because my pet lily
is branched,[1] while this is drawn as unbranched, and especially stated to
be so. And the page of text, in which this statement is made, is so
characteristic of botanical books, and botanical science, not to say all
science as hitherto taught for the blessing of mankind; {2} and of the
difficulties thereby accompanying its communication, that I extract the
page entire, printing it, opposite, as nearly as possible in facsimile.
Now you observe, in this instructive page, that you have in the first
place, nine names given you for one flower; and that among these nine
names, you are not even at liberty to make your choice, because the united
authority of Haller and Miller may be considered as an accurate balance to
the single authority of Linnæus; and you ought therefore for the present to
remain, yourself, balanced between the sides. You may be farther
embarrassed by finding that the Anthericum of Savoy is only described as
growing in Switzerland. And farther still, by finding that Mr. Miller
describes two varieties of it, which differ only in size, while you are
left to conjecture whether the one here figured is the larger or smaller;
and how great the difference is.
Farther, If you wish to know anything of the habits of the plant, as well
as its nine names, you are informed that it grows both at the bottoms of
the mountains, and the tops; and that, with us, it flowers in May and
June,--but you are not told when, in its native country.
The four lines of the last clause but one, may indeed be useful to
gardeners; but--although I know my good father and mother did the best they
could for me in buying this beautiful book; and though the admirable plates
of it did their work, and taught me much, I cannot wonder that neither my
infantine nor boyish mind was irresistibly attracted by the text of which
this page is one of the most favourable specimens; nor, in consequence,
that my botanical studies were--when I had attained the age of fifty--no
farther advanced than the reader will find them in the opening chapter of
this book.
{3}
* * * * *
[318]
ANTHERICUM LILIASTRUM, SAVOY ANTHERICUM,
or ST. BRUNO'S LILY.
_Class and Order._
HEXANDRIA MONOGYNIA.
_Generic Character._
_Cor._ 6-petala, patens. _Caps._ ovata.
_Specific Character and Synonyms._
ANTHERICUM _Liliastrum_ foliis planis, scapo simplicissimo, corollis
campanulatis, staminibus declinatis. _Linn. Syst. Vegetab. ed. 14.
Murr. p. 330._ _Ait. Kew. v. _I._ p. 449._
HEMEROCALLIS floribus patulis secundis. _Hall. Hist. n. 1230._
PHALANGIUM magno flore. _Bauh. Pin. 29._
PHALANGIUM Allobrogicum majus. _Clus. cur. app. alt._
PHALANGIUM Allobrogicum. The Savoye Spider-wort. _Park. Parad. p.
150. tab. 151. f. 1._
* * * * *
Botanists are divided in their opinions respecting the genus of this
plant; LINNÆUS considers it as an _Anthericum_, HALLER and MILLER make
it an _Hemerocallis_.
It is a native of Switzerland, where, HALLER informs us it grows
abundantly in the Alpine meadows, and even on the summits of the
mountains; with us it flowers in May and June.
It is a plant of great elegance, producing on an unbranched stem about
a foot and a half high, numerous flowers of a delicate white colour,
much smaller but resembling in form those of the common white lily,
possessing a considerable degree of fragrance, their beauty is
heightened by the rich orange colour of their antheræ; unfortunately
they are but of short duration.
MILLER describes two varieties of it differing merely in size.
A loamy soil, a situation moderately moist, with an eastern or western
exposure, suits this plant best; so situated, it will increase by its
roots, though not very fast, and by parting of these in the autumn, it
is usually propagated.
PARKINSON describes and figures it in his _Parad. Terrest._, observing
that "divers allured by the beauty of its flowers, had brought it into
these parts."
* * * * *
{4}
Which said book was therefore undertaken, to put, if it might be, some
elements of the science of botany into a form more tenable by ordinary
human and childish faculties; or--for I can scarcely say I have yet any
tenure of it myself--to make the paths of approach to it more pleasant. In
fact, I only know, of it, the pleasant distant effects which it bears to
simple eyes; and some pretty mists and mysteries, which I invite my young
readers to pierce, as they may, for themselves,--my power of guiding them
being only for a little way.
Pretty mysteries, I say, as opposed to the vulgar and ugly mysteries of the
so-called science of botany,--exemplified sufficiently in this chosen page.
Respecting which, please observe farther;--Nobody--I can say this very
boldly--loves Latin more dearly than I; but, precisely because I do love it
(as well as for other reasons), I have always insisted that books, whether
scientific or not, ought to be written either in Latin, or English; and not
in a doggish mixture of the refuse of both.
Linnæus wrote a noble book of universal Natural History in Latin. It is one
of the permanent classical treasures of the world. And if any scientific
man thinks his labors are worth the world's attention, let him, also, write
{5} what he has to say in Latin, finishedly and exquisitely, if it take him
a month to a page.[2]
But if--which, unless he be one chosen of millions, is assuredly the
fact--his lucubrations are only of local and temporary consequence, let him
write, as clearly as he can, in his native language.
This book, accordingly, I have written in English; (not, by the way, that I
_could_ have written it in anything else--so there are small thanks to me);
and one of its purposes is to interpret, for young English readers, the
necessary European Latin or Greek names of flowers, and to make them vivid
and vital to their understandings. But two great difficulties occur in
doing this. The first, that there are generally from three or four, up to
two dozen, Latin names current for every flower; and every new botanist
thinks his eminence only to be properly asserted by adding another.
The second, and a much more serious one, is of the Devil's own
contriving--(and remember I am always quite serious when I speak of the
Devil,)--namely, that the most current and authoritative names are apt to
be founded on some unclean or debasing association, so that to interpret
them is to defile the reader's mind. I will give no instance; too many will
at once occur to any {6} learned reader, and the unlearned I need not vex
with so much as one: but, in such cases, since I could only take refuge in
the untranslated word by leaving other Greek or Latin words also
untranslated, and the nomenclature still entirely senseless,--and I do not
choose to do this,--there is only one other course open to me, namely, to
substitute boldly, to my own pupils, other generic names for the plants
thus faultfully hitherto titled.
As I do not do this for my own pride, but honestly for my reader's service,
I neither question nor care how far the emendations I propose may be now or
hereafter adopted. I shall not even name the cases in which they have been
made for the serious reason above specified; but even shall mask those
which there was real occasion to alter, by sometimes giving new names in
cases where there was no necessity of such kind. Doubtless I shall be
accused of doing myself what I violently blame in others. I do so; but with
a different motive--of which let the reader judge as he is disposed. The
practical result will be that the children who learn botany on the system
adopted in this book will know the useful and beautiful names of plants
hitherto given, in all languages; the useless and ugly ones they will not
know. And they will have to learn one Latin name for each plant, which,
when differing from the common one, I trust may yet by some scientific
persons be accepted, and with ultimate advantage.
The learning of the one Latin name--as, for instance, Gramen striatum--I
hope will be accurately enforced {7} always;--but not less carefully the
learning of the pretty English one--"Ladielace Grass"--with due observance
that "Ladies' laces hath leaves like unto Millet in fashion, with many
white vaines or ribs, and silver strakes running along through the middest
of the leaves, fashioning the same like to laces of white and green silk,
very beautiful and faire to behold."
I have said elsewhere, and can scarcely repeat too often, that a day will
come when men of science will think their names disgraced, instead of
honoured, by being used to barbarise nomenclature; I hope therefore that my
own name may be kept well out of the way; but, having been privileged to
found the School of Art in the University of Oxford, I think that I am
justified in requesting any scientific writers who may look kindly upon
this book, to add such of the names suggested in it as they think deserving
of acceptance, to their own lists of synonyms, under the head of "Schol.
Art. Oxon."
The difficulties thrown in the way of any quiet private student by existing
nomenclature may be best illustrated by my simply stating what happens to
myself in endeavouring to use the page above facsimile'd. Not knowing how
far St. Bruno's Lily might be connected with my own pet one, and not having
any sufficient book on Swiss botany, I take down Loudon's Encyclopædia of
Plants, (a most useful book, as far as any book in the present state of the
science _can_ be useful,) and find, under the head of Anthericum, the Savoy
Lily indeed, but only the {8} following general information:--"809.
Anthericum. A name applied by the Greeks to the stem of the asphodel, and
not misapplied to this set of plants, which in some sort resemble the
asphodel. Plants with fleshy leaves, and spikes of bright _yellow_ flowers,
easily cultivated if kept dry."
Hunting further, I find again my Savoy lily called a spider-plant, under
the article Hemerocallis, and the only information which the book gives me
under Hemerocallis, is that it means 'beautiful day' lily; and then, "This
is an ornamental genus of the easiest culture. The species are remarkable
among border flowers for their fine _orange_, _yellow_, or _blue_ flowers.
The Hemerocallis coerulea has been considered a distinct genus by Mr.
Salisbury, and called Saussurea." As I correct this sheet for press,
however, I find that the Hemerocallis is now to be called 'Funkia,' "in
honour of Mr. Funk, a Prussian apothecary."
All this while, meantime, I have a suspicion that my pet Savoy Lily is not,
in existing classification, an Anthericum, nor a Hemerocallis, but a
Lilium. It is, in fact, simply a Turk's cap which doesn't curl up. But on
trying 'Lilium' in Loudon, I find no mention whatever of any wild branched
white lily.
I then try the next word in my specimen page of Curtis; but there is no
'Phalangium' at all in Loudon's index. And now I have neither time nor mind
for more search, but will give, in due place, such account as I can {9} of
my own dwarf branched lily, which I shall call St. Bruno's, as well as this
Liliastrum--no offence to the saint, I hope. For it grows very gloriously
on the limestones of Savoy, presumably, therefore, at the Grande
Chartreuse; though I did not notice it there, and made a very unmonkish use
of it when I gathered it last:--There was a pretty young English lady at
the table-d'hôte, in the Hotel du Mont Blanc at St. Martin's,[3] and I
wanted to get speech of her, and didn't know how. So all I could think of
was to go half-way up the Aiguille de Varens, to gather St. Bruno's lilies;
and I made a great cluster of them, and put wild roses all around them as I
came down. I never saw anything so lovely; and I thought to present this to
her before dinner,--but when I got down, she had gone away to Chamouni. My
Fors always treated me like that, in affairs of the heart.
I had begun my studies of Alpine botany just eighteen years before, in
1842, by making a careful drawing of wood-sorrel at Chamouni; and bitterly
sorry I am, now, that the work was interrupted. For I drew, then, very
delicately; and should have made a pretty book if I could have got peace.
Even yet, I can manage my point a little, and would far rather be making
outlines of flowers, than writing; and I meant to have drawn every English
and Scottish wild flower, like this cluster of bog heather
opposite,[4]--back, and profile, and front. But 'Blackwood's {10}
Magazine,' with its insults to Turner, dragged me into controversy; and I
have not had, properly speaking, a day's peace since; so that in 1868 my
botanical studies were advanced only as far as the reader will see in next
chapter; and now, in 1874, must end altogether, I suppose, heavier thoughts
and work coming fast on me. So that, finding among my notebooks, two or
three, full of broken materials for the proposed work on flowers; and,
thinking they may be useful even as fragments, I am going to publish them
in their present state,--only let the reader note that while my other books
endeavour, and claim, so far as they reach, to give trustworthy knowledge
of their subjects, this one only shows how such knowledge may be obtained;
and it is little more than a history of efforts and plans,--but of both, I
believe, made in right methods.
One part of the book, however, will, I think, be found of permanent value.
Mr. Burgess has engraved on wood, in reduced size, with consummate skill,
some of the excellent old drawings in the Flora Danica, and has
interpreted, and facsimile'd, some of his own and my drawings from nature,
with a vigour and precision unsurpassed in woodcut illustration, which
render these outlines the best exercises in black and white I have yet been
able to {11} prepare for my drawing pupils. The larger engravings by Mr.
Allen may also be used with advantage as copies for drawings with pen or
sepia.
ROME, _10th May_ (_my father's birthday_).
I found the loveliest blue asphodel I ever saw in my life, yesterday, in
the fields beyond Monte Mario,--a spire two feet high, of more than two
hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue, as well as the flowers.
Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in Elysian fields,
some day!
* * * * *
{12}
CHAPTER I.
MOSS.
DENMARK HILL, _3rd November, 1868._
1. It is mortifying enough to write,--but I think thus much ought to be
written,--concerning myself, as 'the author of Modern Painters.' In three
months I shall be fifty years old: and I don't at this hour--ten o'clock in
the morning of the two hundred and sixty-eighth day of my forty-ninth
year--know what 'moss' is.
There is nothing I have more _intended_ to know--some day or other. But the
moss 'would always be there'; and then it was so beautiful, and so
difficult to examine, that one could only do it in some quite separated
time of happy leisure--which came not. I never was like to have less
leisure than now, but I _will_ know what moss is, if possible, forthwith.
2. To that end I read preparatorily, yesterday, what account I could find
of it in all the botanical books in the house. Out of them all, I get this
general notion of a moss,--that it has a fine fibrous root,--a stem
surrounded with spirally set leaves,--and produces its fruit in a small
case, under a cap. I fasten especially, however, on a {13} sentence of
Louis Figuier's, about the particular species, Hypnum:--
"These mosses, which often form little islets of verdure at the feet of
poplars and willows, are robust vegetable organisms, which do not
decay."[5]
3. "Qui ne pourrissent point." What do they do with themselves, then?--it
immediately occurs to me to ask. And, secondly,--If this immortality
belongs to the Hypnum only?
It certainly does not, by any means: but, however modified or limited, this
immortality is the first thing we ought to take note of in the mosses. They
are, in some degree, what the "everlasting" is in flowers. Those minute
green leaves of theirs do not decay, nor fall.
But how do they die, or how stop growing, then?--it is the first thing I
want to know about them. And from all the books in the house, I can't as
yet find out this. Meanwhile I will look at the leaves themselves.
4. Going out to the garden, I bring in a bit of old brick, emerald green on
its rugged surface,[6] and a thick piece of mossy turf.
First, for the old brick: To think of the quantity of pleasure one has had
in one's life from that emerald green velvet,--and yet that for the first
time to-day I am verily going to look at it! Doing so, through a pocket
{14} lens of no great power, I find the velvet to be composed of small
star-like groups of smooth, strong, oval leaves,--intensely green, and much
like the young leaves of any other plant, except in this;--they all have a
long brown spike, like a sting, at their ends.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
5. Fastening on that, I take the Flora Danica,[7] and look through its
plates of mosses, for their leaves only; and I find, first, that this
spike, or strong central rib, is characteristic;--secondly, that the said
leaves are apt to be not only spiked, but serrated, and otherwise
angry-looking at the points;--thirdly, that they have a tendency to fold
together in the centre (Fig. 1[8]); and at last, after an hour's work at
them, it strikes me suddenly that they are more like pineapple leaves than
anything else.
And it occurs to me, very unpleasantly, at the same time, that I don't know
what a pineapple is!
Stopping to ascertain that, I am told that a pineapple belongs to the
'Bromeliaceæ'--(can't stop to find out what that means)--nay, that of these
plants "the pineapple is the representative" (Loudon); "their habit is
acid, their leaves rigid, and toothed with spines, their {15} bracteas
often coloured with scarlet, and their flowers either white or blue"--(what
are their flowers like?) But the two sentences that most interest me, are,
that in the damp forests of Carolina, the Tillandsia, which is an
'epiphyte' (_i.e._, a plant growing on other plants,) "forms dense festoons
among the branches of the trees, vegetating among the black mould that
collects upon the bark of trees in hot damp countries; other species are
inhabitants of deep and gloomy forests, and others form, with their spring
leaves, an impenetrable herbage in the Pampas of Brazil." So they really
seem to be a kind of moss, on a vast scale.
6. Next, I find in Gray,[9] Bromeliaceæ, and--the very thing I
want--"Tillandsia, the black _moss_, or long moss, which, _like most
Bromelias_, grows on the branches of trees." So the pineapple is really a
moss; only it is a moss that flowers but 'imperfectly.' "The fine fruit is
caused by the consolidation of the imperfect flowers." (I wish we could
consolidate some imperfect English moss-flowers into little pineapples
then,--though they were only as big as filberts.) But we cannot follow that
farther now; nor consider when a flower is perfect, and when it is not, or
we should get into morals, and I don't know where else; we will go back to
the moss I have gathered, for I begin to see my way, a little, to
understanding it.
{16}
7. The second piece I have on the table is a cluster--an inch or two
deep--of the moss that grows everywhere, and that the birds use for
nest-building, and we for packing, and the like. It is dry, since
yesterday, and its fibres define themselves against the dark ground in warm
green, touched with a glittering light. Note that burnished lustre of the
minute leaves; they are necessarily always relieved against dark hollows,
and this lustre makes them much clearer and brighter than if they were of
dead green. In that lustre--and it is characteristic of them--they differ
wholly from the dead, aloe-like texture of the pineapple leaf; and remind
me, as I look at them closely, a little of some conditions of chaff, as on
heads of wheat after being threshed. I will hunt down that clue presently;
meantime there is something else to be noticed on the old brick.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
8. Out of its emerald green cushions of minute leaves, there rise, here and
there, thin red threads, each with a little brown cap, or something like a
cap, at the top of it. These red threads shooting up out of the green
tufts, are, I believe, the fructification of the moss; fringing its surface
in the woods, and on the rocks, with the small forests of brown stems, each
carrying its pointed cap or crest--of infinitely varied 'mode,' as we shall
see presently; and, which is one of their most blessed functions, carrying
high the dew in the morning; every spear balancing its own crystal globe.
9. And now, with my own broken memories of moss {17} and this unbroken,
though unfinished, gift of the noble labour of other people, the Flora
Danica, I can generalize the idea of the precious little plant, for myself,
and for the reader.
All mosses, I believe, (with such exceptions and collateral groups as we
may afterwards discover, but they are not many,) that is to say, some
thousands of species, are, in their strength of existence, composed of
fibres surrounded by clusters of dry _spinous_ leaves, set close to the
fibre they grow on. Out of this leafy stern descends a fibrous root, and
ascends in its season, a capped seed.
We must get this very clearly into our heads. Fig. 2, A, is a little tuft
of a common wood moss of Norway,[10] in its fruit season, of its real size;
but at present I want to look at the central fibre and its leaves
accurately, and understand that first.
10. Pulling it to pieces, we find it composed of seven little
company-keeping fibres, each of which, by itself, appears as in Fig. 2, B:
but as in this, its real size, it {18} is too small, not indeed for our
respect, but for our comprehension, we magnify it, Fig. 2, C, and thereupon
perceive it to be indeed composed of, _a_, the small fibrous root which
sustains the plant; _b_, the leaf-surrounded stem which is the actual
being, and main creature, moss; and, _c_, the aspirant pillar, and cap, of
its fructification.
11. But there is one minor division yet. You see I have drawn the central
part of the moss plant (_b_, Fig. 2,) half in outline and half in black;
and that, similarly, in the upper group, which is too small to show the
real roots, the base of the cluster is black. And you remember, I doubt
not, how often in gathering what most invited gathering, of deep green,
starry, perfectly soft and living wood-moss, you found it fall asunder in
your hand into multitudes of separate threads, each with its bright green
crest, and long root of blackness.
That blackness at the root--though only so notable in this wood-moss and
collateral species, is indeed a general character of the mosses, with rare
exceptions. It is their funeral blackness;--that, I perceive, is the way
the moss leaves die. They do not fall--they do not visibly decay. But they
decay _in_visibly, in continual secession, beneath the ascending crest.
They rise to form that crest, all green and bright, and take the light and
air from those out of which they grew;--and those, their ancestors, darken
and die slowly, and at last become a mass of mouldering ground. In fact, as
I perceive farther, their final duty is so to die. The main work of other
leaves is {19} in their life,--but these have to form the earth out of
which all other leaves are to grow. Not to cover the rocks with golden
velvet only, but to fill their crannies with the dark earth, through which
nobler creatures shall one day seek their being.
12. "Grant but as many sorts of mind as moss." Pope could not have known
the hundredth part of the number of 'sorts' of moss there are; and I
suppose he only chose the word because it was a monosyllable beginning with
m, and the best English general expression for despised and minute
structures of plants. But a fate rules the words of wise men, which makes
their words truer, and worth more, than the men themselves know. No other
plants have so endless variety on so similar a structure as the mosses; and
none teach so well the humility of Death. As for the death of our bodies,
we have learned, wisely, or unwisely, to look the fact of that in the face.
But none of us, I think, yet care to look the fact of the death of our
minds in the face. I do not mean death of our souls, but of our mental
work. So far as it is good _art_, indeed, and done in realistic form, it
may perhaps not die; but so far as it was only good _thought_--good, for
its time, and apparently a great achievement therein--that good, useful
thought may yet in the future become a foolish thought, and then die quite
away,--it, and the memory of it,--when better thought and knowledge come.
But the better thought could not have come if the weaker thought had not
come first, and died in sustaining the {20} better. If we think honestly,
our thoughts will not only live usefully, but even perish usefully--like
the moss--and become dark, not without due service. But if we think
dishonestly, or malignantly, our thoughts will die like evil
fungi,--dripping corrupt dew.
13. But farther. If you have walked moorlands enough to know the look of
them, you know well those flat spaces or causeways of bright green or
golden ground between the heathy rock masses; which signify winding pools
and inlets of stagnant water caught among the rocks;--pools which the deep
moss that covers them--_blanched_, not black, at the root,--is slowly
filling and making firm; whence generally the unsafe ground in the moorland
gets known by being _mossy_ instead of heathy; and is at last called by its
riders, briefly, 'the Moss': and as it is mainly at these same mossy places
that the riding is difficult, and brings out the gifts of horse and rider,
and discomfits all followers not similarly gifted, the skilled crosser of
them got his name, naturally, of 'moss-rider,' or moss-trooper. In which
manner the moss of Norway and Scotland has been a taskmaster and Maker of
Soldiers, as yet, the strongest known among natural powers. The lightning
may kill a man, or cast down a tower, but these little tender leaves of
moss--they and their progenitors--have trained the Northern Armies.
14. So much for the human meaning of that decay of the leaves. Now to go
back to the little creatures themselves. It seems that the upper part of
the moss fibre is {21} especially _un_decaying among leaves; and the lower
part, especially decaying. That, in fact, a plant of moss-fibre is a kind
of persistent state of what is, in other plants, annual. Watch the year's
growth of any luxuriant flower. First it comes out of the ground all fresh
and bright; then, as the higher leaves and branches shoot up, those first
leaves near the ground get brown, sickly, earthy,--remain for ever degraded
in the dust, and under the dashed slime in rain, staining, and grieving,
and loading them with obloquy of envious earth, half-killing them,--only
life enough left in them to hold on the stem, and to be guardians of the
rest of the plant from all they suffer;--while, above them, the happier
leaves, for whom they are thus oppressed, bend freely to the sunshine, and
drink the rain pure.
The moss strengthens on a diminished scale, intensifies, and makes
perpetual, these two states,--bright leaves above that never wither, leaves
beneath that exist only to wither.
15. I have hitherto spoken only of the fading moss as it is needed for
change into earth. But I am not sure whether a yet more important office,
in its days of age, be not its use as a colour.
We are all thankful enough--as far as we ever are so--for green moss, and
yellow moss. But we are never enough grateful for black moss. The golden
would be nothing without it, nor even the grey.
It is true that there are black lichens enough, and {22} brown ones:
nevertheless, the chief use of lichens is for silver and gold colour on
rocks; and it is the dead moss which gives the leopard-like touches of
black. And yet here again--as to a thing I have been looking at and
painting all my life--I am brought to pause, the moment I think of it
carefully. The black moss which gives the precious Velasquez touches, lies,
much of it, flat on the rocks; radiating from its centres--powdering in the
fingers, if one breaks it off, like dry tea. Is it a black species?--or a
black-parched state of other species, perishing for the sake of Velasquez
effects, instead of accumulation of earth? and, if so, does it die of
drought, accidentally, or, in a sere old age, naturally? and how is it
related to the rich green bosses that grow in deep velvet? And there again
is another matter not clear to me. One calls them 'velvet' because they are
all brought to an even surface at the top. Our own velvet is reduced to
such trimness by cutting. But how is the moss trimmed? By what scissors?
Carefullest Elizabethan gardener never shaped his yew hedge more daintily
than the moss fairies smooth these soft rounded surfaces of green and gold.
And just fancy the difference, if they were ragged! If the fibres had every
one of them leave to grow at their own sweet will, and to be long or short
as they liked, or, worse still, urged by fairy prizes into laboriously and
agonizingly trying which could grow longest. Fancy the surface of a spot of
competitive moss!
16. But how is it that they are subdued into that {23} spherical obedience,
like a crystal of wavellite?[11] Strange--that the vegetable creatures
growing so fondly on rocks should form themselves in that mineral-like
manner. It is true that the tops of all well-grown trees are rounded, on a
large scale, as equally; but that is because they grow from a central stem,
while these mossy mounds are made out of independent filaments, each
growing to exactly his proper height in the sphere--short ones outside,
long in the middle. Stop, though; _is_ that so? I am not even sure of that;
perhaps they are built over a little dome of decayed moss below.[12] I must
find out how every {24} filament grows, separately--from root to cap,
through the spirally set leaves. And meanwhile I don't know very clearly so
much as what a root is--or what a leaf is. Before puzzling myself any
farther in examination either of moss or any other grander vegetable, I had
better define these primal forms of all vegetation, as well as I can--or
rather begin the definition of them, for future completion and correction.
For, as my reader must already sufficiently perceive, this book is
literally to be one of studies--not of statements. Some one said of me
once, very shrewdly, When he wants to work out a subject, he writes a book
on it. That is a very true saying in the main,--I work down or up to my
mark, and let the reader see process and progress, not caring to conceal
them. But this book will be nothing but process. I don't mean to assert
anything positively in it from the first page to the last. Whatever I say,
is to be understood only as a conditional statement--liable to, and
inviting, correction. And this the more because, as on the whole, I am at
war with the botanists, I can't ask them to help me, and then {25} call
them names afterwards. I hope only for a contemptuous heaping of coals on
my head by correction of my errors from them;--in some cases, my scientific
friends will, I know, give me forgiving aid;--but, for many reasons, I am
forced first to print the imperfect statement, as I can independently shape
it; for if once I asked for, or received help, every thought would be
frostbitten into timid expression, and every sentence broken by apology. I
should have to write a dozen of letters before I could print a line, and
the line, at last, would be only like a bit of any other botanical
book--trustworthy, it might be, perhaps; but certainly unreadable. Whereas
now, it will rather put things more forcibly in the reader's mind to have
them retouched and corrected as we go on; and our natural and honest
mistakes will often be suggestive of things we could not have discovered
but by wandering.
On these guarded conditions, then, I proceed to study, with my reader, the
first general laws of vegetable form.
* * * * *
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