down over the water like a crinoline, I saw inside, and under the
branches, a number of fair-sized chub of about 1 lb. or 1-1/2 lbs. It
struck me that they felt themselves absolutely safe there, and that if in
any way I could get a bait over them they might take it. The entry under
which I find this chronicled is August 24th. Next morning when the sun was
hot I got a stiff rod and caught a few grasshoppers. Overnight I had cut
out a bough or two at the back of the willow bush, and there was just a
chance that I might be able to poke my rod in and drop the grasshopper on
the water. After that I must trust to the strength of the gut, for the
fish would be unplayable. It was almost like fishing in a faggot-stack.
Peering through the willow leaves I could just see down into the water
where a patch of sunlight about a yard square struck the surface. Under
this skylight I saw the backs of several chub pass as they cruised slowly
up and down. I twisted the last two feet of my line round the rod-top,
poked this into the bush with infinite bother and pluckings at my line
between the rings, and managed to drop the hopper on to the little bit of
sunny water. What a commotion there was. The chub thought they were all in
a sanctuary and that no one was looking. I could see six or seven of them,
evidently all cronies and old acquaintances, the sort of fish that have
known one another for years and would call each other by their Christian
names. They were as cocky and consequential as possible, cruising up and
down with an air, and staring at each other and out through the screen of
leaves between them and the river, and every now and then taking something
off a leaf and spitting it out again in a very independent
connoisseur-like way. The moment the grasshopper fell there was a regular
rush to the place, very different from what their behaviour would have
been outside the bush. There was a hustle and jostle to look at it, and
then to get it. They almost fought one another to get a place. Flop!
Splash! Wallop! "My grasshopper, I think." "I saw it first." "Where are
you shoving to?" "O--oh--what is the matter with William?" I called him
William because he had a mark like a W on his back. But he was hooked fast
and flopping, and held quite tight by a very strong hook and gut, like a
bull with a ring and a pole fastened to his nose. I got him out too--not a
big fish, but about 1-1/2 lbs.
This showed pretty clearly that where chub can be fished for "silently,
invisibly," they can still be caught, even though steam launches or
row-boats are passing every ten minutes. This was mid-August; my next
venture nearly realised the highest ambitions of a chub-fisher. It also
showed the sad limitations of mere instinctive fishing aptitudes in the
human being as contrasted with the mental and bodily resources of a fish
with a deplorably low facial angle and a very poor _morale_. There
was just one place on the river where it seemed possible to remain unseen
yet to be able to drop a bait over a chub. A willow tree had fallen, and
smashed through a willow _bush_. Its head stuck out like a feather
brush in front and made a good screen. On either side were the boughs of
the bush, high, but not too high to get a rod over them, if I walked along
the horizontal stem of the tree. It was only a small tree, and a most
unpleasant platform. But I had caught a most appetising young frog, rather
larger than a domino, which I fastened to the hook, and after much
manoeuvring I dropped this where I knew some large chub lay. As the tree
had only been blown down a day before, I was certain that they had never
been fished for at that spot.
[Illustration: A MONSTER CHUB. _From a drawing by Lancelot Speed._]
I was right; hardly had the frog touched the water when I saw a monster
chub rise like a dark salamander out of the depths. Slowly he rose and
eyed the frog, moving his white lips as if the very sight imparted a gusto
to the natural excellence of young frogs. I nearly dropped from the tree
stem from sheer suspense, when he made up his mind, put on steam, and took
it! He was fast in a minute, and kindly rushed out into the river, where I
played him. Then I wound in my line and hauled him up till his head and
mouth were out of the water. As there was an impenetrable screen of bushes
between him and me I laid the rod down, trusting to the tackle, and ran
round to where close by was a farm punt, made fast. It had been used
during harvest time, and was full of what in the classics they call the
"implements of Ceres." All of these that do not seem made to cut your leg
off are designed to run into and spike you. Besides scythes and reap
hooks, there were iron rakes (sharp end upwards), wooden rakes,
pitchforks, and garden forks, and the difficulty was to move in the punt
without getting cut or spiked. The last users of the punt had also taken
peculiar care to fasten it up. It was anchored by a grapnel, and by an
iron pin on a chain, the pin eighteen inches long and driven hard into the
bank. In a desperate hurry I hauled up the grapnel, did a regular Sandow
feat in pulling up the iron peg, seized a punt pole apparently weighted
with lead, but made out of an ash sapling, and started the punt. It would
not move. I found there was another mooring, so picking my way among the
scythes, spikes, rakes, &c., I hauled this in. It was most infernally
heavy, and turned out to be a cast-iron wheel of a steam plough or other
farming implement. Then I was under weigh, and got round to the fish. It
was still there. I could see its expressionless eye (about as big as a
sixpence) out of the water and its mouth wide open, when I remembered I
had forgotten the landing-net in my hurry. Then came the period of mental
aberration common to the amateur. The fish was certainly 4 lbs. in weight,
yet I tried to get him in with my hands. Of course he gave one big flop,
slipped out, and disappeared--the biggest chub I ever shall not catch.
THE WORLD'S FIRST BUTTERFLIES
Thames plants must strike every one as belonging to an ancient order of
life. But the vast clouds of winged _ephemeridae_ that dance over its
waters when there is a rise of "May-fly" in early summer look to be not
only the creatures of a day, but of our day. In the astonishing wave and
rush of life seen at such times, when from every plant and pool winged
creatures are ascending to float in air, it is difficult to picture the
silence and stillness of a world where there were no birds, or hum of
bees, and no signs of the other insects which exceed the other population
of the earth by unnumbered myriads of millions; yet the insects, even the
same identical species which dance over the Thames to-day, are among the
very oldest of living things, just as its plants and its shells are. Rocks
and slate are not ideal butterfly cases; and if the fragile limbs of the
beetle and grasshopper of the successive prehistoric worlds had perished
beyond the power of identification, no one could have felt surprise. But
such has been the industry of modern naturalists--to give the widest name
to those who have devoted their time to the search for, and description
of, fossil insects--that the remains of thousands of species have been
identified, and the time of their appearance upon the earth approximately
fixed. The latest contributor to this elegant branch of the study of
fossils is Mr. Herbert Goss.[1] Perhaps the most interesting of his
conclusions is the antiquity, not only of the existing orders of insects,
but even of their particular families and genera, as compared with
vertebrate animals. It is astonishing to find not only crickets and
beetles existing at periods enormously earlier than the appearance of
birds or fish, but that they conformed in type to the families in which
they are classed to-day. Though they become fewer and fewer as they are
tracked back up the river of time, there are not found in the earliest
fossil-bearing rocks any connecting links or earlier and simpler forms of
insect life, or a clue to the common ancestor of insects, spiders, and
shrimps, which naturalists would dearly like to discover. There is a
baffling completeness about these creatures. When in the lias period, for
instance, the vertebrates were huge saurian reptiles and flying lizards,
and scarcely any of our existing classes of fish had come into existence,
the beetles, cockroaches, crickets, and white ants were there, with all
the distinguishing characteristics of the existing families as they were
settled by Linnaeus.
The first insect known to have existed, a creature of such vast antiquity
that it deserves all the respect which the parvenu man can summon and
offer to it, was--a cockroach. This, the father of all black-beetles,
probably walked the earth in solitary magnificence when not only kitchens,
but even kitchen-middens were undreamt of, possibly millions of years
before Neolithic man had even a back cave to offer with the remains of
last night's supper for the cockroach of the period to enjoy. His
discovery established the fact that in the Silurian period there were
insects, though, as the only piece of his remains found was a wing, there
has been room for dispute as to the exact species. Mr. Goss in his preface
to the second edition of his book notes that what is probably a still
older insect has been found in the lower Silurian in Sweden. This was not
a cockroach, but apparently something worse. If the Latin name,
_Protocimex Silurius_, be literally translated, it means the original
Silurian bug. It was a fair conjecture that insects appeared about the
same time as land plants first grew on the earth. As almost all the
species either feed on some vegetable substances in growth or decay, or
else live upon other insects, some such provision of food was necessary
for them. Remains of such plants were discovered in the Silurian rocks. In
the Devonian formations, which contain the next oldest set of fossil
insects, numbers of conifers and ferns are found. Yet even then the only
vertebrate animals seem to have been fish. The insects still had the land
all to themselves. Of one of these Devonian insects the base of a wing was
the only part preserved in the rock. From this it was possible to tell the
order to which the creature belonged. It was one of the
_Neuroptera_--insects with wings in which the veins run straight down the
wing, sometimes joined by cross branches at right angles. Some of the
modern kinds are very beautiful four-winged flies, with bright colours on
their wings like butterflies. Others are ant-lions or caddis-flies. The
curve of the fragment of wing also suggested its probable size when
unbroken. It was perhaps two inches long. As there are little horny rings
round the wing base like those which crickets have, on which they rub
their legs and so "chirp," it is also quite likely that this insect of
hoary antiquity did the same, and enlivened the silence of Devonian fern
groves with a prehistoric hum. It is quite in keeping with modern ideas
that in that age of fishes one of the most remarkable insects should have
been a kind of May-fly, "a large species of _Ephemerina_, which must have
measured five inches in expanse of wings." Thus our Thames May-flies had
gigantic prehistoric ancestors, which appeared on earth, possibly with
their present associates the caddis flies, at an enormously remote age.
So far no butterfly had yet appeared on earth, though the
_Ephemerinae_ might dance over the still lagoons and swamps. In the
coal-forest period, and the age of trees and rank vegetation, insects of
many kinds seem to have multiplied, even though the most beautiful of all
were not yet launched in air. In England the first beetle wandered on to
the stage of life--the oldest British insect fossil known. It was
discovered in the ironstone of Coalbrookdale, and was a kind of weevil.
Another creature found in the same ironstone was a cricket. It is quite in
keeping with the forest and tree surroundings of the time that white ants
should have abounded to eat up the decayed and dead wood. Strictly
speaking, black-beetles are not beetles at all. But they are a very good
imitation. As some hundreds of families of _Paltaeoblattidae_, which
may be translated as "old original cockroaches," and _Blattidae_, or
cockroaches _pur sang_, pervaded these forests, and the doyen of all
Swiss fossil animals is one of these, the "state of the streets" in a coal
forest may be imagined when there were no bird police to keep the insects
in order. Thus the end of the Palaeozoic world--a very poor world at
best--was fairly well stocked with insects, though the moths, bees, and
butterflies had yet to come. Then came the sunrise of a new time--mammals,
any number of reptiles, possibly some birds, and an insect life more
teeming than any we now know. The "insect limestone" attests these
multitudes. Beetles, of which the scarabs were a numerous family,
increased vastly, and the oldest known dragon-fly and supposed ancestor of
those which hawk over the Oxford river, left his skeleton, or what
represents a dragon-fly's skeleton, among some two thousand other
specimens of fossil insects, in the Swiss Alps. It was then that the first
bird and the first butterfly appeared. The bird was the famous
Archaeopteryx, found in the Solenhofen slate, and the first butterfly, to
use an Irishism, was a moth, a sphinx moth, apparently about the size of
the Convolvulus sphinx moth. This stone-embedded relic of the moth that
sucked the juices of the plants of the Mesozoic world, incalculable ages
before the time even of the gigantic mammals, is preserved in the Teyler
Museum at Haarlem. When the new era of the Eocene period developed modern
forms of plants, their rapid growth was accompanied by a great increase in
the number of insects. Those which, like the moths, had only made their
first venture on earth, now appeared in greater numbers. Near Aix, in
Provence, five butterflies and two moths were found in some beds of marl
and gypsum long celebrated for their fossils, and with the fossil
butterflies were, in every case but one, fossil remains of the plants
which had served its larvae as food. Thus the May-flies and beetles are
perhaps older than the Thames shells, and older than the prehistoric
plants on which the river molluscs feed.
[1] Secretary of the Entomological Society, and an accomplished botanist.
The work is entitled "The Geological Antiquity of Insects," and published
by Gurney and Jackson, London.
BUTTERFLY SLEEP
Fond as the butterflies are of the light and sun, they dearly love their
beds. Like most fashionable people who do nothing, they stay there very
late. But their unwillingness to get up in the morning is equalled by
their equal desire to leave the world and its pleasures early and be
asleep in good time. They are the first of all our creatures to seek
repose. An August day has about fifteen hours of light, and for that time
the sun shines for twelve hours at least; but the butterflies weary of sun
and flowers, colour and light, so early that by six o'clock, even on warm
days, many of them have retired for the night. I climbed Sinodun Hill, on
a cold, windy afternoon, and found that hundreds of butterflies were all
falling asleep at five o'clock. Their dormitory was in the tall,
colourless grass, with dead seed-heads, that fringes the tracks over the
hills, or the lanes that cross the hollows. Common blues were there in
numbers, and small heath butterflies almost as many. The former, each and
every one of them, arrange themselves to look like part of the seed-spike
that caps the grass-stem. Then the use and purpose of the parti-coloured
grey and yellow under-colouring of their wings is seen. The butterfly
invariably goes to sleep head downwards, its eyes looking straight down
the stem of the grass. It folds and contracts its wings to the utmost,
partly, perhaps, to wrap its body from the cold. But the effect is to
reduce its size and shape to a narrow ridge, making an acute angle with
the grass-stem, hardly distinguishable in shape and colour from the
seed-heads on thousands of other stems around.[1] The butterfly also
sleeps on the top of the stem, which increases its likeness to the natural
finial of the grass. In the morning, when the sunbeams warm them, all
these grey-pied sleepers on the grass-tops open their wings, and the
colourless bennets are starred with a thousand living flowers of purest
azure. Side by side with the "blues" sleep the common "small heaths." They
use the grass-stems for beds, but less carefully, and with no such obvious
solicitude to compose their limbs in harmony with the lines of the plant.
They also sleep with their heads downwards, but the body is allowed to
droop sideways from the stem like a leaf. This, with their light
colouring, makes them far more conspicuous than the blues. Moreover, as
grass has no leaves shaped in any way like the sleeping butterfly, the
contrast of shape attracts notice. Can it be that the blues, whose
brilliant colouring by day makes them conspicuous to every enemy, have
learnt caution, while the brown heaths, less exposed to risk, are less
careful of concealment? Be it noticed that moths and butterflies go to
sleep in different attitudes. Moths fold their wings back upon their
bodies, covering the lower wing, which is usually bright in colour, with
the upper wing. They fold their antennas back on the line of their wings.
Butterflies raise the wings above their bodies and lay them back to back,
putting their antennae between them if they move them at all. On these
same dry grasses of the hills, another of the most brilliant insects of
this country may often be seen sleeping in swarms--the carmine and green
burnet moth. But it is a sluggish creature, which often seems scarcely
awake in the day, and its surrender to the dominion of sleep excites less
surprise than the deep slumber of the active and vivacious butterflies.
The "heaths" and "blues" should perhaps be regarded as the gipsies of the
butterfly world, because they sleep in the open. They are even worse off
than the nomads, because, like that regiment sleeping in the open which
the War Office lately refused to grant field allowance to on the ground
that they were "not under canvas," they do not possess even a temporary
roof. What we may call the "garden butterflies," especially the red
admirals, often do seek a roof, going into barns, sheds, churches,
verandahs, and even houses to sleep. There, too, they sometimes wake up in
winter from their long hibernating sleep, and remind us of summer days
gone by as they flicker on the sun-warmed panes. Mrs. Brightwen
established the fact that they sometimes have fixed homes to which they
return. Two butterflies, one a brimstone, the other, so far as the writer
remembers, a red admiral, regularly came for admission to the house. One
was killed by a rain-storm when the window was shut; the other hibernated
in the house. Probably it was as a sleeping-place and bedroom that the
butterflies made it their home. There is a parallel instance, mentioned by
a Dutch naturalist quoted by Mr. Kirby, when a butterfly came night after
night to sleep on a particular spot in the roof of a verandah in the
Eastern Archipelago. In the East the sun itself is so regular and so rapid
in rising and setting that the sleeping hours of insects and birds are far
more regular than in temperate lands, with their shifting periods of light
and darkness. Our twilight, that season that the tropics know not, has
produced a curious race of moths, or rather, a curious habit confined to
certain kinds. They are the creatures neither of day nor of night, but of
twilight. They awake as twilight begins, go about their business and enjoy
a brief and crepuscular activity, and go to sleep as soon as darkness
settles on the world. At the first glimmer of the dawn they awaken again
to fly till sunrise, when they hurry off like the fairies, and sleep till
twilight falls again.
[Illustration: BUTTERFLIES AT REST. _From photographs by R.B. Lodge._]
At the time of writing a border of bright flowers runs in straight
perspective from the window opposite, with a rose arcade by the border,
and a yew hedge behind that. The shafts of the morning sun fly straight
down to the flowers, and every blossom of hollyhock, sunflower, campanula,
and convolvulus, and the scarlet ranks of the geraniums, are standing at
"attention" to welcome this morning inspection by the ruler and
commander-in-chief of all the world of flowers. The inspecting officers,
rather late as inspecting officers are wont to be, are overhauling and
examining the flowers. These inspectors, also roused by the sun, are the
butterflies and bees. Splendid red admirals are flying up, and alighting
on the sunflowers, or hovering over the pink masses of valerian. Peacock
butterflies, "eyed" like Emperors' robes, open and shut their wings upon
the petals; large tortoiseshells are flitting from flower to flower;
mouse-coloured humming-bird moths are poising before the red lips of the
geraniums; and a stream of common white butterflies is crossing the lawn
to the flowers at the rate of twenty a minute. They all come from the same
direction, across a cornfield and meadow, behind which lies a wood. The
bees came first, as they are fairly early risers; the butterflies later,
some of them very late, and evidently not really ready for parade, for
they are sitting on the flowers stretching, brushing themselves, and
cleaning their boots--or feet. The fact is that the butterflies, late
though it is, are only just out of bed. You might look all the evening to
find the place where these particular butterflies sleep, and not discover
it, unless some of them have taken a fancy to the verandah or the inside
of a dwelling-room in the house. But each and every one of them has been
asleep in a place it has chosen, and it is probable that some, the red
admirals, for instance, will go back to that place to sleep at evening.
As there are hundreds of moths that fly by night and sleep by day at
seasons when there are perhaps only twenty species of butterflies flying
by day and sleeping by night, it is strange that the sleeping moths are
not more often found. Some kinds are often disturbed, and are seen. But
the great majority are sleeping on the bark of trees, in hedges, in the
crevices of pines, oaks and elms, and other rough-skinned timber, and we
see them not. Some prefer damp nights with a drizzle of rain to fly in,
not the weather which we should choose as inviting us to leave repose. Few
like moonlight nights; darkness is their idea of a "fine day" in which to
get up and enjoy life, many, like the dreams in Virgil's Hades, being all
day high among the leaves of lofty trees, whence they descend at the
summons of night, the--
"Filmy shapes
That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes,
And woolly breasts, and beaded eyes,"
The connection between character and bedtime which grew up from
association when human life was less complex than now has some counterpart
in the world of butterflies and insects. The industrious bees go to bed
much earlier than the roving wasps. The latter, which have been out
stealing fruit and meat, and foraging on their own individual account,
"knock in" at all hours till dark, and may sometimes be seen in a state of
disgraceful intoxication, hardly able to find the way in at their own
front door. The bees are all asleep by then in their communal dormitory.
It would not be human if some belief had not arisen that the insects that
fly by night imitate human thieves and rob those which toil by day. There
has always been a tradition that the death's-head moth, the largest of all
our moths, does this, and that it creeps into the hives and robs the bees,
which are said to be terrified by a squeaking noise made by the gigantic
moth, which to a bee must appear as the roc did to its victims. It is said
that the bees will close up the sides of the entrance to the hive with
wax, so as to make it too small for the moth to creep in. Probably this is
a fable, due to the pirate badge which the moth bears on its head. But it
is certainly fond of sweet things, and as it is often caught in empty
sugar-barrels, it is quite possible that it does come to the hive-door at
night and alarm the inmates in its search for honey.
[1] In the illustration it was impossible to photograph butterflies
actually sleeping. They show their attitude, but not the degree to which
the wings are flattened into a very acute angle.
CRAYFISH AND TROUT
About the middle of August, when walking by one of the locks on a disused
canal in the Ock Valley, I saw a man engaged in a very artistic mode of
catching crayfish. The lock was very old, and the brickwork above water
covered with pennywort and crane's-bill growing where the mortar had
rotted at the joints. In these same joints below water the crayfish had
made holes or homes of some sort, and were sitting at the doors with their
claws and feelers just outside, waiting, like Mr. Micawber, for something
to turn up. To meet their views the crayfish catcher had cut a long willow
withe. From the tapering tip of this he had cut the wood, leaving the
bark, which had been carefully slit and the woody tip extracted from it.
This pendant of bark he had made into a running noose, and leaning over
the bank he worked it over the crayfish's claws and then snared them. It
was a neat adaptation of local means to an end; for if you think of it,
string would not have answered, because it would not remain rigid, and
wire would be too stiff for the job.