THE OPEN EYE
We have seen how the passion for the study of nature was born with
Gibson, and grew with his growth. He was a naturalist by nature; and all
his training strengthened in him the passion which made the young boy,
with a “Cecropia” in sight, “feel like an eagle darting at her prey.”
The natural world was to him a perpetual attraction, a land to be
explored, a mystery to be searched, a delight to be enjoyed. The
frontispiece to his chapter “Across Lots” in “Highways and Byways”
represents an upland shrubby pasture, beyond whose limits gleam the
waters of a pond, backed by a round-topped hill. In the foreground
stretches a rail fence, with a gateway whose bars are dropped; and this
open pathway to the wild fields and waters he has suggestively entitled
“An Invitation.” That invitation was continually pressing upon him. He
always felt it, outweighing all other calls, summoning him from every
other career, bidding him take to the fields and the woods and the
hills, to listen, to see, to learn, and to impart. In 1867, when he was
a boy of seventeen, convalescing from a severe illness, he wrote to a
dear friend:
[Illustration: “_Cypripedium Acaule_”
(“_My Studio Neighbors_”) _Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers_]
“You ask me what I do all day. This question is very easily answered. It
is the same thing over and over again day after day. The great part of
the time I spend in the woods, alone. I start off about ten o’clock in
the morning and ramble through the woods and thickets. There is one spot
in particular which I frequent the most, because there are two
wood-thrushes which invariably come and sing to me. This spot is a
singular little dell. It is situated in front of a precipice two hundred
feet high, in among ferns and large rocks which are shaded by hemlock
trees. It is on these trees that the wood-thrushes sit and chant their
songs by the hour. Oh, I do not believe I could be happy if this
pleasure were taken away from me. I am always happy alone in the woods.
I dare say I am destined to spend half my life in just such places. This
is the daily program of the way I spend my time. Silly isn’t it? But I
can’t help it. It is my nature to enjoy nature, and I mean to do it at
every opportunity.” That outburst struck the keynote of Gibson’s life
and spirit.
But his love of nature, like his knowledge of it, was broad and
catholic. He was not a specialist in any narrow or pedantic sense. He
was botanist, ornithologist, entomologist, biologist, all in one. A
butterfly had as much interest for him as an evening-primrose, a
chipmunk as a nuthatch. Everything was grist that came to his mill.
Nothing could better illustrate this universal love of all living
things, than a note which he left, on which he intended evidently to
base a sketch. Imperfect as it is, it is an admirable illustration of
his method and of his broad sympathy and interest. He begins with
several experiments at a title, and then outlines his plan; after which
he enumerates the “available episodes,” as he calls them, to fill the
outline:
“‘A Rare Day with the Speckled Trout. Speckled Beauties. A Rare Day’s
Trouting.’ See Burroughs’s ‘Speckled Trout,’ Prime’s ‘I go a-Fishing,’
Isaak Walton.
“Begin: It was the 29th of June. A glimpse of a large platter of
speckled trout, a one day’s catch displayed with pride by a neighbor,
revived my old-time zeal and reminded me that there was but one day left
in which to beat the record. I consequently start off fully equipped,
and meet with an interesting train of episodes, and an accumulation of a
basket of specimens,--plants, insects, bird’s nests. Following the
course of the stream, the incidents are such as are perfectly
appropriate to this setting and the season. A trout occasionally alluded
to, as an accessory, jumping, etc.
“Or begin with quotation about ‘Not even a minister is to be trusted on
the subject of fish.’ Fish stories. I have one to tell which however it
may compare with others has at least the merit of truth. It is true that
I once caught forty-nine trout, within an hour; but that was not a
circumstance to the fortune which has often since befallen me. My last
is a fair sample of these lucky days.
“End something in this vein,--after an enumeration of natural beauties:
And, by the way, the trout? There in the rippling pools; for I left them
all there! And yet there are those who would have followed my trail, and
have brought home nothing but a basketful of dead fish. Finish with some
apt quotation or quaint proverb, of how one went and brought back chaff,
and another fetched the kernel.”
It is plain that such a man as this did not love Nature for the sake of
the contribution she made to his particular sport or his favorite study.
He was one of that class whom Professor John Van Dyke has in mind, in
entitling a certain book of his “Nature for Its Own Sake.” He was out
after anything that mother Nature vouchsafed to put in his way, and he
gathered up reverently whatever he found, as something good for him
because it came from her. Witness a single incident in which he modestly
attributes to fortune what was quite as much due to his own habitual
alertness.
“By a fortunate train of weather conditions I was once favored with a
phenomenon by which almost the entire vegetable bill of fare of the
winter birds, at least in the way of seeds, was spread out before
me--brought to my feet, as it were.
“Walking upon the firm and polished snow-crust, picking my way along a
rail-fence at the foot of a steep, sloping pasture, I suddenly aroused
into flight a flock of small birds from behind the bulwark of drifts
with which the fence was hemmed in and partially buried. So loud was the
united flutter of their wings that it at first suggested the whir of a
partridge, until I saw it dissipated in the flock of smaller fry above
the edge of the drift. They proved to be, as I remember, mostly
snowbirds, white buntings, and goldfinches, though doubtless the
cedar-birds, winter-wrens, tree-sparrows, pine and purple finches, were
also among them. Their noisy flight was the signal for a general alarm
all along the line, following the fence for several hundred feet, each
zigzag corner sending up its winged bevy to perch and twitter upon the
upper rails. Almost every projecting beam showed its chirruping
sentinel.
“Interested to discover the secret of such a great feathery convocation,
I crept up to the edge of the slippery drift and looked over. Beyond the
fence rose the steep, white, glistening slope of the pasture, a distance
of a furlong or more, its surface mottled with its brown withered
vegetation. Following the rambling rails on either side were drifts of
the most fantastic form, now and then almost peering above the fence
riders, and between them ran a winding valley, in which the old fence
seemed to be walking knee-deep in snow. It needed only a second glance
into this hollow, whence the startled flocks had flown, to understand
its attractiveness for the birds. Its depths were fairly littered with
the choicest kind of allurement. The very cream of the pasture had
flowed into this trough. It was the hopper which had received the entire
wind-blown tribute of the weedy upland that looked down upon it, and of
the overhanging woods far up the slope. Here were wind-rows of various
seeds which had been dislodged from the weeds and trees and blown along
the glassy snow to be caught in this convenient bin. The small
goblet-shaped hollows around the projecting grass-stems were full to the
brim with their good cheer, and the deeper vales and gullies were marked
out everywhere by their brown meandering lines of intermingled chaff and
seeds, often to the depth of two inches or more. A happy valley and a
land of plenty, surely!
“A single handful of this grist taken up at random presented a
surprising variety of elements, offering a wide choice for the most
fastidious bird appetite. Curious to test this question further, I
followed the fence for a long distance, occasionally sampling the meadow
crumbs, and continually discovering some new ingredient of fruit or
seed.
“Even the powdery chaff which I blew away in order to better reveal the
larger morsels, proved to be the fine seed of various grasses and
sedges; while among the more conspicuous which remained I noted the
following considerable list, not to mention others which were then
beyond my limited botanical knowledge. The seeds of the alder, birch,
hemlock, ragweed, bur-marigold, and wild-carrot, were, perhaps, the most
numerous and general. There was an exclusive colony of dried grapes
assembled in one particular corner, doubtless laying their plans for a
future arborescent monopoly of the rails in their vicinity. I found,
also, numbers of larch seeds, both with and without their wings.
Stag-horn-sumach, poison-ivy, ash, and hop-hornbeam representatives were
frequent, and one chaffy handful, downy with goldenrod and aster seeds
was lit up with a bright scarlet berry of black alder, like a tiny live
coal in a bed of ashes. There was an occasional withered poke-berry to
be met with, also fruits of sheep-berry, _ampelopsis_, juniper, and
hawthorn. Another sample challenged my audacious familiarity with the
fangs of a _Cenchrus_ bur--the spiny fruit of the hedgehog grass, and
still another was pretty well doctored with the poisonous seeds of
stramonium, or jimson-weed, a line of which followed along the base of a
drift like an open trail fuse of blasting powder leading up to a drill
hole well calked with chaff. I recall also a few samaras of the
tulip-tree, some hazel-nuts, oats, foxtail-grass seed, as well as
several other queer diminutive forms which were unknown to me at the
time, and which I cannot now identify from memory.”
If we were to name the quality most characteristic of his work as a
naturalist, it would be his habit of close and accurate observation. He
saw more of the objects and incidents of the natural world in a square
rod, than most men, even fairly observant, would see in a square mile.
His books are a mass of evidence of the minuteness and the accuracy of
his observations; and his note-books tell with still greater force the
story of his patience and industry in preparing himself to report what
he had seen. They show that he looked and saw for himself, and that his
stories of plant and insect life are genuine studies, at first hand. A
fine instance of the personal observation and actual experience which
lay behind his work is afforded in the case of the chapter upon the
“Bombardier-Beetle” in “Sharp Eyes.” It is but a brief sketch, and
reports only a curious performance on the part of a rather rare insect.
But the observed facts on which it is based are set down in a record
almost as long as the sketch itself, and in a manner to show the
foundation of close attention and scrutiny to which he was continually
subjecting the face of the earth. He writes under date of September
28th, at Williamstown, Massachusetts. The note begins with a memorandum
to the effect that he carried his camera, with four plates, and that he
observed tumble-bugs, ichneumon flies, and dung beetles. “In turning
over a large stone, as is my habit in my walks, I discerned beneath it a
little beetle which I at first supposed to be the common species, so
closely resembling the Bombardier beetle of Europe. I had no special
desire to capture it, and as it escaped beneath the grass and debris, my
attention was arrested by a series of queer detonations, which made me
suspect that some kind of a toad lay concealed near by. As I rummaged
among the leaves I heard the queer report right at my fingers’ ends, and
at the same time noticed a tiny cloud of smoke emerging from the same
quarter. The fact then dawned upon me that perhaps I had discovered a
genuine Bombardier. A moment’s search revealed the little fellow, and he
discharged his battery six times or so. I captured him. I have not yet
read of this species having been discovered in America. And certainly
the allied species of this country possess no such detonating power.
Before the detonation the body of the beetle would swell considerably. I
kept the beetle and several of its allied species in a box some weeks
afterward, and observed the explosion several times. Mrs. Gibson also
heard it once and distinctly saw the small cloud of smoke of the
volatile fluid. About two days after the capture of the Bombardier, I
espied a beetle crawling on the floor of my room, and thinking that my
pet had escaped I captured the insect. It proved to be another of the
same species, but evidently of the other sex, and it was undoubtedly
seeking for its imprisoned mate. There are numerous parallel instances
in my own experience, but in this instance it is especially remarkable
that I should find a second individual of a species so rare in America
that I had never been able to find one before; and although I overturned
at least a thousand stones during my stay in Williamstown, I was never
able to discover another specimen.”
A few weeks earlier in the same summer, he recorded another incident
which shows his alertness of eye and the success with which it was
constantly rewarded. He was on a trip to South Amboy, to study orchids
in a conservatory there. He wrote:
“In a ramble near the station I found (as usual) exactly what I had
started out to hunt for, a large patch of milkweed. This luck is an
every day experience with me and has long since ceased to be a surprise.
Once let my vision be set on the qui-vive for any given object, and I am
led to it as by some irresistible intuition. No matter whether the
object sought be a four-leaved clover, a certain flower, a rare
caterpillar, a gold-bug or a ‘walking-stick,’ I am soon rewarded. I was
desirous of discovering a specimen of an insect laden with pollen of
milkweed. In less than ten minutes I found a large tract of pollen, in
full bloom. In an instant more I detected a beautiful Cetonia beetle,
nestling in a tuft of blossoms. Soon there came a small yellow hornet,
which I captured. Its legs were fringed with the pollen-masses. So were
the toes of the beetle.”
Probably Gibson explains his own success in a sentence or two in one of
his own chapters: “Anticipation is an equipment, the surest talisman to
discovery, and anticipation may be quickened, either by pictorial hint
or previous experience. The retina must be on the alert.” That certainly
was true of his own eye, and the fact that he was such an enthusiastic
seeker accounts in large measure for the fact that he was such a
successful finder.
His notebooks show the broad scope of his observations and of his
studies. They cover every corner of natural life. One day he would go
out and bring back material for pages of memoranda concerning the chase
of what he believed to be a hermit thrush. On another day he makes an
entry of fourteen varieties of golden-rod analyzed, six kinds of aster,
and, as he adds, “many others.” One page of his notes gives the results
of careful experiments with three dozen dandelion blossoms, to determine
how long the flower requires to pass from bud to the state when it
floats away in silvery down. Another passage records in a minute
description his first observation of the snapping of the witch-hazel
seeds, to which he adds a list of a dozen subjects for illustration. He
counts the number of different plants he finds in his city back-yard.
He sets down the things seen in a walk through the Park with a lantern,
from nine o’clock to eleven at night. He notes that on a certain June
29th, in the midst of a heavy thunder storm he heard the song of the
Wilson thrush in the woods near his house. He makes liberal memoranda of
the things most touching his attention after a fresh snow-fall. He sets
down a list of more than a score of birds whose song he heard “in a
continuous roundel,” while sitting on his porch on a quiet Sunday.
Thoreau in his hermit haunts at Walden was not more minute and attentive
in his observations than this eager three-fold worker, hurrying from
city to country and back to city again, equally busy at sketching, and
writing, and observing. There are pages upon pages of his notes which
read like the “Natural History of Selborne” in their detailed and
leisurely narrative of things seen and heard in the fields and beside
the brooks. In these records of his intermittent life in the country one
never hears the faintest echo of the bustling round of the dweller in
cities. He drops all that when he locks the door of his town-house
behind him. Once in the open air he is again the free and buoyant youth,
preoccupied only by the purposes and the pursuits which belong to the
open air, the meadow, and the wood. Indeed it seems as if his early
training and experiences, those school-days at the “Gunnery,” the
passions there born, the habits there fostered and confirmed, lay at
the basis of all his life afield. He himself somewhere said: “To the
average observer, if the eye is ever thus to be a means of grace, it
must store up its harvest while hearts are light and life is new, when
eyes are bright and undimmed. How many a prisoner caged in city walls is
living on the harvest stored in free, unburdened youth, which has never
been replenished.” Perhaps that was true of this observer so much above
the “average,” and caught for half his time in the city’s durance.
But even there he proved again the truth of Lovelace’s lines:
“Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage.”
He made the city rural, and told others his secret:
“How little do we appreciate our opportunities for natural observation!
Even under the most apparently discouraging and commonplace environment,
what a neglected harvest! A back-yard city grass-plot, forsooth, what an
invitation! Yet there is one interrogation to which the local naturalist
is continually called to respond. If perchance he dwells in Connecticut,
how repeatedly is he asked, ‘Don’t you find your particular locality in
Connecticut a specially rich field for natural observation?’ The
botanist of New Jersey or the ornithologist of Esopus-on-Hudson is
expected to give an affirmative reply to similar questions
[Illustration: _Upland Meadows_
_From a Painting_]
concerning his chosen hunting-grounds, if, indeed, he does not avail
himself of that happy aphorism with which Gilbert White was wont to
instruct his questioners concerning the natural-history harvest of his
beloved Selborne: ‘That locality is always richest which is most
observed.’
“With the possession of a back-yard, then, there is still hope for the
most case-hardened cit. Let the quickened sod have its freedom of
expression, and the grasses and weeds a respite from the sickle. Give
the cold shoulder to the gardener, or, if need be, confine his arts to
the fence border, and if you would repeat my experience, let the
chrysanthemum claim the chief part of his attention. Twenty-five
varieties of this plant bloomed in my borders last season, and they won
my admiration, not less because of their beautiful display of color,
which more than once relieved itself against a background of snow, than
for the sterling wisdom they had displayed in biding their time until
the rival wildlings of my grass-plot had seen their day.
“Next summer my square of turf shall again contribute to my enjoyment,
yea, though I seed the whole community with thistles, tares, and
fleabane, and run the gauntlet of the city ordinances.”
Gibson was mindful of the exhortation, “To do good and to communicate,
forget not.” He could not contain himself, when he knew so many
interesting things. He was a born teacher, a communicator and medium of
knowledge. His studies all had a real if unconscious aim. He could not
content himself with making them simply as a contribution to the field
of facts, nor to the formation of theories. He wanted them to go farther
and furnish information to other men. He craved an audience. He needed
pupils, or at least auditors. It was not for the sake of being heard by
others, or of hearing himself, either; he wanted others to know and to
enjoy the great store of wonderful and fascinating things which mother
Nature keeps in store for those who love her. He was a genuine
missionary of science, an apostle of art, a herald of the wonders and
beauties of the world. His social nature, eager for companionships,
sought associates in knowledge. He loved to share what he had received.
And he took others into his confidence as soon as he had unearthed a new
secret of the world around us. He had the same spirit in scientific
knowledge that sends men and women to preach the gospel to the ignorant
and misguided. Indeed, in one of his letters, outlining the idea of his
“Sharp Eyes,” he uses the word “missionary,” which he repeats in the
introduction to that volume. The whole paragraph in which it occurs
shows Gibson’s feeling toward those who, “having eyes, see not:”
“Recognizing too the evident hunger for information concerning
every-day objects in Nature, and that where one individual would write
for enlightenment one hundred would wonder in silence and ten thousand
would dwell in heedless ignorance, I realized that such a book might
also go forth as a missionary to open the eyes of the blind, or at least
to quicken a desire for fuller comprehension of the omnipresent marvel
and beauty of the commonplace.” One can realize how to such a nature,
with such a sense of responsibility to others, a letter like the
following would appeal, written by a friend of his who had given much of
her time and strength to thought and labor for the interest of working
girls:
“It has come to me through my association with these working girls that
the meagerness of their lives does not so much mean the lack of _things_
as the lack of _thoughts_, and I have been planning these talks which
have been running through the winter in answer to the question ‘What
shall we think about?’ I have asked every one to make the talk simple
and plain and I have tried to impress upon them that it is to be _only_
a talk, not a lecture. I have also sought for simple themes, so that
they need not be so far above the comprehension of the untrained minds
that it would find no answering chord in their desires. If we can take
the every-day things which you and I know are full of a wonderful
interest, if one but know how to see them, and open their eyes to their
wonders, I have believed that one would be opening doors into an
undreamed-of fairy land to them. So you see why I come to you. You are
one of the door-keepers into that fairy land. Will you open it for us?”
This desire to inform others kept him wholly free from anything like
pedantry. He had none of the self-importance of men who try to make a
little knowledge go a great way. Nor was he forgetful of the
difficulties of less instructed minds. His style in picture and in
speech was simple and direct. He had no passion for long words. He did
not find it necessary to befog others with the technical speech of the
specialists. He was the friend of children and simple country folk and
the unlearned everywhere; and they will owe him a debt of gratitude that
he spoke in their language and made them understand him. “I wonder,” he
once said, “if the time will ever come when a man may read a botanical
work without understanding Latin.” It was one of his ambitions to write
such a book; he meant to make a botany in English, and illustrate it
himself. Over fifteen hundred drawings, as we have seen, are in
existence which he had accumulated with this work in view,--one more of
the many schemes that fertile mind was projecting, never, alas! to be
carried out.
Of all the great nature students of our time, Richard Jeffries ranks as
the one most closely in touch with the sub-human world, the earth and
all the life it bears in and on its bosom. His whole soul seems
exquisitely in tune with the cosmos. He breathes with the respirations
of the earth; he sighs with the breath of the winds; his senses and his
thoughts sway with the bending of the grain and the waving of the
tree-tops. “To know him,” says his eulogist, Mr. Ellwanger, “is to
approach nearer the heart of the flower, the mystic concave of the sky,
and the elusive verge of the horizon.” But in this respect he has a peer
in William Hamilton Gibson. No man ever lived on friendlier terms with
nature. As close, as accurate, as patient in his observation as any of
the classic characters in nature love, he has a distinction all his own,
a peculiar personal attitude toward all extra-human life. He feels and
he expresses a sort of fellowship with life in other than human form. He
accepts the lesser things as little brothers and sisters of the human.
He gives the right hand of fellowship to whatever has life. He
humanizes, if one may so term it, the life which lies below man’s in the
vital scale. What writer since the days of the primeval fairy tales ever
brought the worlds of human life and other life so near each other? He
seems a modern Siegfried, into whose ears the birds talk, and the grass
whispers as it grows. When he comes back from an exploration into the
insect realm close to his own doorstep, he reports what he has seen and
heard precisely as if he were recounting the talk and doings of his own
kind. He translates this life of beetle and spider and bee and ant and
bird into the terms of human life and activity. He makes all life seem
related to our lives, all being to appear of one substance, all to be
worthy of interest, sympathy, love, and reverence. More than any other
mind of his generation he leads us to feel that kinship of all life
which Drummond has asserted in “The Ascent of Life,” and which Professor
Shaler has condensed into a phrase in calling it “The Bond of the
Generations.” That was a shrewd and sagacious disclosure of character,
as well as a bit of fun, which led his mother to write, in the letter
already quoted, “How are your friends and dear companions, the worms?”
He was on terms of friendship with all living things. But to any mind at
all sensitive to the real and deeper meaning of nature, to its spiritual
origin, its profound unity, this underlying affinity of all its forms of
life, there was a bit of true philosophy in the mother’s comment. It was
certainly truer and wiser than the criticism once made upon his
intellectual temperament in the columns of the “Tribune.” “So
thoroughly,” said this reviewer, “was he absorbed in the life of the
humbler animals and plants that one suspects he was quite out of his
element elsewhere. He was incapable of assigning them a relative place.
To him they were always supreme. And because they were supreme they were
colored and transformed by his humanizing and anthropomorphizing
whimseys. He was always reading into them his own charming qualities of
mind and heart, at the same time that he was imitating their own
quickness and alertness. Indeed, natural life always appealed not so
much to his imagination as to his fancy. He was absorbed in nature as a
child is absorbed in its playthings. With all his minuteness of
knowledge, he never fully and unqualifiedly faced the two great facts of
the natural world, the struggle for existence, and the survival of the
fittest. He exaggerated and instinctively transformed the natural world,
and to the using of it as the source and stimulus of his own acute
poetic ingenuity, devoted all his energies and interest.” The criticism
is brilliant, but superficial; and its kindly temper does not atone for
its total injustice and perversion of values. It is pure assumption, in
the first place, to call the “struggle for existence, and the survival
of the fittest” “the two great facts of the natural world.” Who
authorizes the ranking of those facts as prime or principal? Why not
assign the highest place to the continuity of life, and the conservation
of advantages, and the advance of types? These are quite as impressive
facts as those others. And if they are suggestive of quite other
inferences neither Gibson nor any nature lover need be disparaged for
choosing to dwell upon those inferences. If he, like a growing company
of later students and observers, was impressed with the fraternity of
all lives, great and small, with the analogies between the human and the
dumb creation, and felt the kinship of even insects and birds, with
their later and more favored human cousins,--if we may not use a closer
term,--why should this keener insight be called a “whimsey,” and this
deeper divination a “fancy”? And because he had a nature which thrilled
and fired with the delight of knowledge and all the mental activity
which it sets in motion, why should he be accused of using his growing
store of that knowledge as a wine to warm his fancy and a spur to the
making of similes? The fact is, Gibson not only saw and faced the law of
struggle and of survival, but he saw a great deal more. And if he did
not dwell upon these facts with the lugubrious emphasis which
characterized so many of his contemporaries in science, it was not
because he saw them out of relation, but in truer and clearer
perspective. There has been too little sympathy, too little of the
“humanizing and anthropomorphizing” spirit in scientific research.
Gibson was a prophet, in advance of his day. What he was doing is fast
becoming the dominant spirit of investigators. And many more laws and
principles will be laid bare when men come to realize that all living
things are of one blood, than are to be discerned through the cold and
unsympathetic gaze of old-fashioned science. Gibson’s habit, moreover,
was not a “humanizing” of animal and plant life, in the sense of trying
to force our life upon theirs, attributing human thoughts and aims and
feelings to the lower creation. It was rather an effort to link their
life to ours, by insight, sympathy, and study. He simply made men feel
the kinship of all living things. In that he was fully in the spirit of
the most advanced science. He believed thoroughly in the truth contained
in a sentence which he quoted from “the rapt philosopher of Walden”:
“Man cannot afford to be a naturalist and look at nature directly. He
must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look
at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone.”
How thoroughly he grasped the spirit of the “new botany” which traces
the links between the animal and insect worlds one passage will suffice
to show.
“What startling disclosures are revealed to the inward eye within the
hearts of all these strange orchidaceous flowers! Blossoms whose
functions, through long eras of adaptation, have gradually shaped
themselves to the forms of certain chosen insect sponsors; blossoms
whose chalices are literally fashioned to bees or butterflies; blossoms
whose slender, prolonged nectaries invite and reward the murmuring
sphinx-moth alone, the floral throat closely embracing his head while it
attaches its pollen masses to the bulging eyes, or perchance to the
capillary tongue! And thus in endless modifications, evidences all of
the same deep vital purpose.
“Let us then content ourselves no longer with being mere
‘botanists’--historians of structural facts. The flowers are not mere
comely or curious vegetable creations, with colors, odors, petals,
stamens, and innumerable technical attributes. The wonted insight alike
of scientist, philosopher, theologian, and dreamer is now repudiated in
the new revelation. Beauty is not ‘its own excuse for being,’ nor was
fragrance ever ‘wasted on the desert air.’ The seer has at last heard
and interpreted the voice in the wilderness. The flower is no longer a
simple passive victim in the busy bee’s sweet pillage, but rather a
conscious being, with hopes, aspirations, and companionships. The insect
is its counterpart. Its fragrance is but a perfumed whisper of welcome,
its color is as the wooing blush and rosy lip, its portals are decked
for his coming, and its sweet hospitalities humored to his tarrying; and
as it finally speeds its parting affinity rests content that its life’s
consummation has been fulfilled.”
How closely he observed and how much he read “between the lines” appears
in his account of his introduction to the study of entomology, the first
awakening of his real interest in what became the object of a consuming
passion.
“It was a day in early June, and nature was bursting with exuberance.
The very earth was teeming with awakening germs--here an acorn, with its
biformed hungry germ--parody on the dual mission of mortal life--one
seeking earth, the other heaven; here
[Illustration: “_The Bobolink at Home_”
(“_Strolls by Starlight_”)
_Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers_]
an odd little elf of maple, with his winged cap still clinging as he
danced upon his slender stem; while numerous nameless green things clove
the sod and matted leaves, and slender coils of ferns unrolled in eager
grasp from their woolly winter nest.
“But dear to my heart as were these familiar tokens, how quickly were
they all forgotten in my contemplation simply of a little stone that lay
upon a patch of mold directly at my elbow, and my wandering eyes were
riveted upon it, for it seemed as though in the universal quickening
even this also had taken life.
“I can see it this moment. It moves again, and yet again, until now,
with a final effort, it is lifted from its setting and rolled away,
while in its place there protrudes from the ground a chrysalis risen
from its sepulcher. Filled with wonder, I sit and watch as though in a
dream, awaiting the revelation from this mysterious earthly messenger,
when suddenly the encasement swells and breaks, the cerements are burst,
and the strange shape gives birth to the form of a beautiful moth--a
tender, trembling thing, which emerges from the empty shell and creeps
quivering upon an overhanging spray.
“Now followed that beautiful and wonderous unfolding of the winged
life--the softly-falling crumpled folds, the quivering pulsations of the
new-born wings eager for their flight, until at length their glory
shone in purity and perfection--a trial flutter, and the perfect being
took wing and flew away!
“Thus did I become a votary to that science known as ‘entomology.’ What
wonder, then, that it should yield to me in after life a winged
significance, a spirit of unrest that bursts the shell of mere
terminology, and enjoys a realm of resource not found in books, except,
indeed, between the lines? For the entomology which I would seek is not
yet written, and it is beyond my conception that any one among its
votaries could witness unmoved by its deeper impress a spectacle such as
this, or could find through the retina of science alone an ample
insight.”
It is a curious feature of his experience that even the birds and the
beasts seemed to feel this sympathy of his, and permitted him to take
such liberties with them as they seldom grant. So many stories of his
power and its exercise have gone out, that it seems best to let him give
his own version of it. The first instances are narrated in a letter
written from the Thorn Mountain House, Jackson, New Hampshire, in
September, 1883:
“Among other things that Mrs. Farr has confided to a few of her newly
made friends at the Intervale, is my remarkable power over animals and
birds, by which I take them in my hand alive in the woods, and tame
them. But while this idea of hers originally started in a joke, I am
gradually becoming convinced that I _have_ the power she attributes to
me, but fail to develop or utilize it. On the very day she first spread
the rumor, I walked with herself and husband in Cathedral Woods. He
espied a squirrel jumping along the pine needles with a cone in his
mouth. I suddenly conceived the notion to capture him. I followed him
for a few paces and finally succeeded in placing my hand over him and
catching him, holding him in my hand for several minutes afterward, as
my fingers still bear witness from the network of scratches they
exhibit. On the following day I almost caught a chick-a-dee, and to cap
the climax, of all things, to-day, after dinner, while sitting on the
porch I observed what I supposed to be a day-sphinx hovering over a bed
of flowers across the lawn. I approached and soon discovered it to be a
humming-bird, and was about to turn back when the thought suggested
itself to try and catch the little fellow. Accordingly I approached and
watched him closely for a moment or two, drawing nearer and nearer the
while. He soon seemed to get accustomed to my presence and came to sip
the honey from some verbenas at my feet. I lowered my hand slowly, and
closed it about his tiny body with perfect ease and he seemed to make no
effort to release himself. I took him to my room and closing the windows
gave him wing. I played with him for nearly an hour and he at length
became so tame that he would alight upon my finger and jump from one
finger to another placed in front of him, and even preen his feathers.
He was a dear little creature and I almost wanted to keep him. He would
alight upon the window shutter, and when I held my finger an inch or so
in front of him he would jump on it and fluff out his feathers. I could
pick him up at any moment and lay him on his back in my hand, where he
would remain perfectly quiet, with his bright black eyes moving all
about as alive as could be. At length I concluded to give him his
freedom, but in order first to allow the guests of the house an
opportunity to see my diminutive captive, I tied a long piece of cotton
twine loosely in one knot about one of his tiny feet and thus exhibited
him. The twine was so heavy that it eased his occasional flight and the
softness of it prevented injury to his foot. When all had seen him I cut
the string close to his leg and away he went like the wind, no doubt
taking his first opportunity to pick off the loose fold of string still
dangling to his leg. Once before I almost picked a humming-bird from a
flower, and I believe I can do it again and again with a few trials. So
I feel less than ever like disabusing the mind of Mrs. Farr of what at
first seemed so incredible and improbable.”
In the chapter on “Woodnotes” in “Happy Hunting Grounds” Gibson
describes the incident which was mentioned by Dr. Raymond at his
funeral. He was once standing in line with many others at the polls in
a voting-place in Brooklyn, when a dove flew down and into the room, and
came straight to him, alighting upon his shoulder. No one in the place
knew anything about the bird, or had ever seen it before. No one could
see why it should have chosen him over all others in the group of
voters. Possibly Mr. Gibson’s own explanation will have to answer. In
his note of the incident he says, “I remarked to the bystanders, ‘That
bird knows a good Republican when he sees one.’”
Others also recall the incident of Dr. Abbott’s visit to Washington,
when Mr. Gibson pointed out a bird in a near-by tree and began to
describe its peculiar markings. Soon he rose impulsively, went up to the
tree, reached out for the bird, and took the little creature in his
hand, without its appearing in the least alarmed or hurt. Then, when he
had finished his description and thus illustrated it from life, he
replaced his specimen in the tree, whence it flew away. He certainly
seemed to have that about him which made even the birds feel that he
loved them and meant them no harm.
His crowning work as a naturalist was done in the lectures upon the
cross-fertilization of plants which fascinated so many audiences with
the novel story of one of nature’s most amazing manifestations of
adaptation and of resource. For years he had been a careful student of
Sprengel, Darwin, and Müller, whose experiments and studies he
supplemented with careful observations of his own, upon the relations of
plant-and insect-life. He accumulated a mass of studies and of notes. He
brooded over this theme for years. And at last, driven to utterance, he
prepared himself, as few men are able to, for a series of lectures,
illustrated with charts of his own invention and his own making. The
machinery of these lectures was a superb test of his triple powers as
naturalist, as artist, as writer. They were based on a solid and
accurate knowledge of natural history. They were illustrated by a master
hand in mechanical technique, reinforced by an artist’s skill in drawing
and in color. They were set forth in a text which was clear, vivacious,
and forceful. They constituted one of the most delightful and popular
courses ever given before the American public. His own account of the
origin of these lectures is most interesting. He had been in the habit
of giving informal talks and lectures upon natural history in his summer
home at Washington, illustrating them by rapid sketches on the
blackboard. “When I came,” he said, “to touch upon the topic of
inter-association and inter-communion of insects and flowers, especially
the mechanism of flowers, their movements and forms, I found that I was
handicapped, as many other scientists had been, by the difficulty of
expressing motion by fixed drawings and descriptions. It occurred to me
to make a drawing of the sage-blossom with its tilted stamen fastened on
separately to show the movement. This I did. It proved to be a
revelation to myself and I made several other sectional charts of
flowers and of insects that same summer. They served to demonstrate
ocularly and simply, without the slightest effort on the part of my
audience, what had heretofore been presented only in difficult technical
descriptions. There really seemed to be a new field for work, and I
accepted the indications and concentrated my thought upon the theme.” A
writer who had been an attendant at these lectures gives this
description of them:
“The lecture describes some general principles about a group of flowers
and their associated insect-visitors, and while the listener is
endeavoring to induce his imagination to form some picture of the
process, Mr. Gibson steps to a screen, hangs up and unfolds a
beautifully executed sketch of the flower, and gives an ocular
demonstration of the thing he has just described. One sees the bee crawl
into the sage-blossom, tilt the pivoted stamens, and come out with the
pollen upon his back, which burden he is now ready to carry to another
blossom, upon whose pistil he partly unloads it. The same busy bee
creeps into the pogonia and straightway two powdery anthers are clasped
to his side, leaving their visible deposit of yellow dust. The orchids
are made to clap sticking-plasters upon their visitors, or to hurl
bombshells of pollen on their heads. There is no room for failure to
understand. The whole process is demonstrated before the sight, by a
mechanism which works to a charm, a visible and artistic unfolding of
the most subtle operations of the plant and insect world.”
An instant and complete success awaited this new venture. Everywhere
there was a demand for the lectures, and they were received with a
popular interest rather surprising when one considers how thoroughly
scientific they were. The farmers of his own neighborhood; the members
of sedate city clubs; school-children and society-women,--all classes
and types of people with any appetite for knowledge, or any sense of the
wonderful in nature, joined in the applause which greeted Gibson’s
appearance as a lecturer upon natural history. He repeated upon the
platform the success he had won as a writer and an artist. He
established his reputation as a master in scientific demonstration. It
was truly said of him that the field he entered in these lectures “had
not since the days of Agassiz been cultivated with such success as by
Mr. Gibson.” As a popular teacher of scientific fact no man in this
country since Agassiz gained such a hold or did such a work as he. There
is no doubt that if he had lived he would have won an international
renown in this field as well as that of art.
[Illustration: _The Writing Desk_
_Brooklyn Studio_]