SWITZERLAND IN EARLY SUMMER
It is the early summer of 1910 and I have but just returned from a
visit to Switzerland. The latter part of June and the beginning of
July is the best for a stay in that splendid and happy land if one is
a naturalist, and cares for the beauty of Alpine meadows, and of the
flowers which grow among and upon the rocks near the great glaciers.
This year the weather has, no doubt, been exceptionally cold and wet,
and at no great height (5,000 feet) we have had snow-storms, even in
July. But as compared with that of Paris and London the weather has
been delightful. There has been an abundance of magnificent sunshine,
and many days of full summer heat and cloudless sky. A fortnight ago
(July 16th), and on the day before, it was as hot and brilliant in the
valley of Chamonix as it can be. Mont Blanc and the Dome de Goutet
stood out clear and immaculate against a purple-blue sky, and, as of
old, we watched through the hotel telescope a party struggling, over
the snow to the highest peak.
At Chillon the lake of Geneva, day after day, spread out to us its
limitless surface of changing colour, now blending in one pearly
expanse with the sky--so that the distant felucca boats seemed to
float between heaven and earth--now streaked with emerald and
amethystine bands. The huge mountain masses rising with a vast sweep
from St. Jingo's shore displayed range after range of bloom-like greys
and purples, whilst far away and above delicately glittered--like some
incredible vision of a heavenly world beyond the sun-lit sky
itself--the apparition of the snows and rocks of the great Dents du
Midi. All this I have left behind me, and have passed back again to
dull grey Paris, to the stormy Channel, and to the winter of London's
July.
The incomparable pleasure which the lakes and valleys and mountains of
Switzerland are capable of giving is due to the combination of many
distinct sources of delight, each in itself of exceptional character.
A month ago, in bright sunshine, I went, once again, by the little
electric railway (most blessed invention of our day) from the
pine-shaded torrent below to the great Eiger rock-mountain, and
through its heart to the glacier beyond, more than 10,000 feet above
sea-level. On the way back I left the train at the foot of the Eiger
glacier, and walked down with my companion amongst the rocks of the
moraine and over the sparse turf of these highest regions of life.
Everywhere was a profusion of gentians, the larger and darker, as well
as the smaller, bluest of all blue flowers. The large, plump, yellow
globe-flowers (_Trollius_), the sulphur-yellow anemone, the glacial
white-and-pink buttercup, the Alpine dryad, the Alpine forget-me-nots
and pink primroses, the summer crocus, delicate hare-bells, and many
other flowers of goodly size were abundant. The grass of Parnassus and
the edelweiss were not yet in flower, but lower down the slopes the
Alpine rhododendron was showing its crimson bunches of blossom. It is
a pity that the Swiss call this plant "Alpenrose," since there is a
true and exquisite Alpine rose (which we often found) with deep red
flowers, dark-coloured foliage, and a rich, sweet-briar perfume.
Lovely as these larger flowers of the higher Alps are, they are
excelled in fascination by the delicate blue flowers of the
Soldanellas, like little fringed foolscaps, by the brilliant little
red and purple Alpine snap-dragon, and by the cushion-forming growths
of saxifrages and other minute plants which encrust the rocks and
bear, closely set in their compact, green, velvet-like foliage, tiny
flowers as brilliant as gems. A ruby-red one amongst these is "the
stalkless bladder-wort" (_Silene acaulis_), having no more resemblance
at first sight to the somewhat ramshackle bladder-wort of our fields
than a fairy has to a fishwife. There are many others of these
cushion-forming, diminutive plants, with white, blue, yellow, and pink
florets. Examined with a good pocket lens, they reveal unexpected
beauties of detail--so graceful and harmonious that one wonders that
no one has made carefully coloured pictures of them of ten times the
size of nature, and published them for all the world to enjoy. Busily
moving within their charmed circles we see, with our lens, minute
insects which, attracted by the honey, are carrying the pollen of one
flower to another, and effecting for these little pollen flowers what
bees and moths do for the larger species.
Thus we are reminded that all this loveliness, this exquisite beauty,
is the work of natural selection--the result of the survival of
favourable variations in the struggle for existence. These minute
symmetrical forms, this wax-like texture, these marvellous rows of
coloured, enamel-like encrustation, have been selected from almost
endless and limitless possible variations, and have been accumulated
and maintained there as they are in all their beauty, by survival of
the fittest--by natural selection. All beauty of living things, it
seems, is due to Nature's selection, and not only all beauty of colour
and form, but that beauty of behaviour and excellence of inner quality
which we call "goodness." The fittest, that which has survived and
will survive in the struggle of organic growth, is (we see it in these
flowers) in man's estimation the beautiful. Is it possible to doubt
that just as we approve and delightedly revel in the beauty created by
"natural selection," so we give our admiration and reverence, without
question, to "goodness," which also is the creation of Nature's great
unfolding? Goodness (shall we say virtue and high quality?) is, like
beauty, the inevitable product of the struggle of living things, and
is Nature's favourite no less than man's desire. When we know the ways
of Nature, we shall discover the source and meaning of beauty, whether
of body or of mind.
As these thoughts are drifting through our enchanted dream we suddenly
hear a deep and threatening roar from the mountain-side. We look up
and see an avalanche falling down the rocks of the Jungfrau. The vast
mountain, with its dazzling vestment of eternal snow, and its slowly
creeping, green-fissured glaciers, towers above into the cloudless
sky. In an instant the mind travels from the microscopic details of
organic beauty, which but a moment ago held it entranced, to the
contemplation of the gigantic and elemental force whose tremendous
work is even now going on close to where we stand. The contrast, the
range from the minute to the gigantic, is prodigious yet exhilarating,
and strangely grateful. How many millions of years did it take to form
those rocks (many of them are stratified, water-laid deposits) in the
depths of the ocean? How many more to twist and bend them and raise
them to their present height? And what inconceivably long persistence
of the wear and tear of frost and snow and torrent has it required to
excavate in their hard bosoms these deep, broad valleys thousands of
feet below us, and to leave these strangely moulded mountain peaks
still high above us? And that beauty of the sun-lit sky and of the
billowy ice-field and of the colours of the lake below and of the
luminous haze and the deep blue shade in the valley--how is that
related to the beauty of the flowers? Truly enough, it is not a beauty
called forth by natural selection. It is primordial; it is the beauty
of great light itself. The response to its charm is felt by every
living thing, even by the smallest green plant and the invisible
animalcule, as it is by man himself. As I stand on the mountain-side
we are all, from animalcule to man, sympathizing and uniting, as
members of one great race, in our adoration of the sun. And in doing
this we men are for the moment close to and in happy fellowship with
our beautiful, though speechless, relatives who also live. Even the
destructive bacteria which are killed by the sun probably enjoy an
exquisite shudder in the process which more than compensates them for
their extinction.
The pleasures of flower-seeking in Switzerland are by no means
confined to the great heights. At moderate heights (4,000 to 5,000
feet) you have the Alpine meadows, and below those the rich-soiled
woods which fill in the sides of the torrent-worn valleys. You cannot
see an Alpine meadow after July, as it is cut down by then. It is at
its best in June. It bears very little grass, and consists almost
entirely of flowers. In places the hare-bells and Canterbury bells and
the bugloss are so abundant as to make a whole valley-floor blue as in
MacWhirter's picture. But more often the blue is intermixed with the
balls of, red clover and the spikes of a splendid pale pink polygonum
(a sort of buckwheat) and of a very large and handsome plantain. Large
yellow gentians, mulleins, the nearly black and the purple orchids,
vetches of all colours, the Alpine clover with four or five enormous
flowers in a head instead of fifty little ones, the Astrantias (like a
circular brooch made up of fifty gems each mounted on a long elastic
wire and set vibrating side by side), the sky-blue forget-me-nots, and
the golden potentillas, are usually components of the Alpine meadow.
At Murren, and no doubt commonly elsewhere, there are a few very
beautiful grasses among the flowers, but the most remarkable grass is
one (_Poa alpina_), which has on every spikelet or head a bright green
serpent-like streamer. Each of these "streamers" is, in fact, a young
grass-plant, budded off "viviparously," as it is called, from the
flower-head, or "spikelet," and having nothing to do with the proper
fertilized seed or grain. The young plants so budded fall to the
ground, and striking root rapidly, grow into separate individuals. It
is probably owing to some condition in Alpine meadows adverse to the
production of fertilized seed that this viviparous method of
reproduction has been favoured, since it occurs also in an Alpine
meadow-plant allied to the buckwheat, namely, _Polygonum viviparum_
(not the kind mentioned above), where the lower flowers are converted
into little red bulbs, by which the plant propagates. Both the
viviparous grass and the polygonum are found in England. In fact, a
very large proportion of Alpine plants occur in parts of the British
islands (a legacy from the glacial period), though many which are
abundant in Switzerland are rare and local here.
At a lower level, in the woods, we come upon other plants, not really
"Alpine" at all, but of great and special beauty. We found four kinds
of winter-green (_Pirola_), one with a very large, solitary flower,
white and wax-like, and the beautiful white butterfly-orchid with
nectaries three quarters of an inch long, and other large-flowered
orchids. We were anxious to find the noble Martagon lily, and hunted
in many glades and forest borders for it. At last, concealed on a bank
in a wood, between Glion and Les Avants, it revealed itself in
quantity, many specimens standing over three feet in height. Martagon
is an Arabic word, signifying a Turkish cap. A very strange and
uncanny-looking lily, which I had never seen before, turned up near
Kandersteg at the Blue Lake, beloved of Mr. H. G. Wells. This is "the
Herb Paris." It has four narrow outstretched green sepals, and four
still narrower green petals, eight large stamens, and a purple seed
capsule. Its broad oval leaves are also arranged in whorls of four.
Its name has nothing to do with the "ville lumiere," nor with the
Trojan judge of female beauty, but refers to the symmetry and "parity"
of its component parts. I was not surprised to find that "the Herb
Paris" is poisonous, and was anciently used in medicine. It looks
weird and deadly.
Marmots, glacier fleas (spring-tails, not true fleas), admirable
trout, and burbot (the fresh-water cod, called "lote" in French),
outrageous wood-gnats, which English people call by a Portuguese name
as soon as they are on the Continent, and singing birds (usually one
is too late in the season to hear them) were our zoological
accompaniment. There were singularly few butterflies or other insects,
probably in consequence of the previous wet weather.
_July, 1909_