PINGUICULA.
(Written in early June, 1881.)
1. On the rocks of my little stream, where it runs, or leaps, through the
moorland, the common Pinguicula is now in its perfectest beauty; and it is
one of the offshoots of the violet tribe which I have to place in the minor
collateral groups of Viola very soon, and must not put off looking at it
till next year.
There are three varieties given in Sowerby: 1. Vulgaris, 2.
Greater-flowered, and 3. Lusitanica, white, for the most part, pink, or
'carnea,' sometimes: but the proper colour of the family is violet, and the
perfect form of the plant is the 'vulgar' one. The larger-flowered variety
is feebler in colour, and ruder in form: the white Spanish one, however, is
very lovely, as far as I can judge from Sowerby's (_old_ Sowerby's) pretty
drawing.
The 'frequent' one (I shall usually thus translate 'vulgaris'), is not by
any means so 'frequent' as the Queen violet, being a true wild-country, and
mostly Alpine, plant; and there is also a real 'Pinguicula Alpina,' which
we have not in England, who might be the Regina, if the group were large
enough to be reigned over: but it is better not to affect Royalty among
these confused, intermediate, or dependent families.
2. In all the varieties of Pinguicula, each blossom has one stalk only,
growing from the _ground_ and you may pull all the leaves away from the
base of it, and keep the flower only, with its bunch of short fibrous
roots, half an inch long; looking as if bitten at the ends. Two flowers,
characteristically,--three and four very often,--spring from the same root,
in places where it grows luxuriantly; and luxuriant growth means that
clusters of some twenty or thirty stars may be seen on the surface of a
square yard of boggy ground, quite to its mind; but its real glory is in
harder life, in the crannies of well-wetted rock.
3. What I have called 'stars' are irregular clusters of approximately, or
tentatively, five aloeine ground leaves, of very pale green,--they may be
six or seven, or more, but always run into a rudely pentagonal arrangement,
essentially first trine, with two succeeding above. Taken as a whole the
_plant_ is really a main link between violets and Droseras; but the
_flower_ has much more violet than Drosera in the make of it,--spurred, and
_five-petaled_,[11] and held down by the top of its bending stalk as a
violet is; only its upper two petals are not reverted--the calyx, of a dark
soppy green, holding them down, with its three front sepals set exactly
like a strong trident, its two backward sepals clasping the spur. There are
often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal number is five. Tearing
away the calyx, I find the flower to have been held by it as a lion might
hold his prey by the loins if he missed its throat; the blue petals being
really campanulate, and the flower best described as a dark bluebell,
seized and crushed almost flat by its own calyx in a rage. Pulling away now
also the upper petals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and
well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the lower (largest) petal
near its origin, and opposite the point of the seizure by the calyx,
spreading from this centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly
like an irregular shower of fine Venetian glass broken, partly like the
wild-flung Medusa like embroidery of the white Lucia.[12]
4. The calyx is of a dark _soppy_ green, I said; like that of sugary
preserved citron; the root leaves are of green just as soppy, but pale and
yellowish, as if they were half decayed; the edges curled up and, as it
were, water-shrivelled, as one's fingers shrivel if kept too long in water.
And the whole plant looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a
bog, and obliged to live there--not for its own sins, but for some Emperor
Pansy's, far away in the garden,--in a partly boggish, partly hoggish
manner, drenched and desolate; and with something of demoniac temper got
into its calyx, so that it quarrels with, and bites the corolla;--something
of gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable
sensuality, even in its desolation. Perhaps a penguin-ish life would be
truer of it than a piggish, the _nest_ of it being indeed on the rock, or
morassy rock-investiture, like a sea-bird's on her rock ledge.
5. I have hunted through seven treatises on Botany, namely, Loudon's
Encyclopædia, Balfour, Grindon, Oliver, Baxter of Oxford, Lindley ('Ladies'
Botany'), and Figuer, without being able to find the meaning of
'Lentibulariaceæ,' to which tribe the Pinguicula is said by them all
(except Figuier) to belong. It may perhaps be in Sowerby:[13] but these
above-named treatises are precisely of the kind with which the ordinary
scholar must be content: and in all of them he has to learn this long,
worse than useless, word, under which he is betrayed into classing together
two orders naturally quite distinct, the Butterworts and the Bladderworts.
Whatever the name may mean--it is bad Latin. There is such a word as
Lenticularis--there is no Lentibularis; and it must positively trouble us
no longer.[14]
The Butterworts are a perfectly distinct group--whether small or large,
always recognizable at a glance. Their proper Latin name will be
Pinguicula, (plural Pinguiculæ,)--their English, Bog-Violet, or, more
familiarly, Butterwort; and their French, as at present, _Grassette_.
The families to be remembered will be only five, namely,
1. Pinguicula Major, the largest of the group. As bog plants, Ireland may
rightly claim the noblest of them, which certainly grow there luxuriantly,
and not (I believe) with us. Their colour is, however, more broken and less
characteristic than that of the following species.
2. Pinguicula Violacea: Violet-coloured Butterwort, (instead of
'vulgaris,') the common English and Swiss kind above noticed.
3. Pinguicula Alpina: Alpine Butterwort, white and much smaller than either
of the first two families; the spur especially small, according to D. 453.
Much rarer, as well as smaller, than the other varieties in Southern
Europe. "In Britain, known only upon the moors of Rosehaugh, Ross-shire,
where the progress of cultivation seems likely soon to efface it."
(Grindon.)
4. Pinguicula Pallida: Pale Butterwort. From Sowerby's drawing, (135, vol.
iii,) it would appear to be the most delicate and lovely of all the group.
The leaves, "like those of other species, but rather more delicate and
pellucid, reticulated with red veins, and much involute in the margin. Tube
of the corolla, yellow, streaked with red, (the streaks like those of a
pansy); the petals, pale violet. It much resembles Villosa, (our Minima,
No. 5,) in many particulars, the stem being hairy, and in the lower part
the hairs tipped with a viscid fluid, like a sundew. But the Villosa has a
slender sharp spur; and in this the spur is blunt and thick at the end."
(Since the hairy stem is not peculiar to Villosa, I take for her, instead,
the epithet Minima, which is really definitive.)
The pale one is commonly called 'Lusitanica,' but I find no direct notice
of its Portuguese habitation. Sowerby's plant came from Blandford,
Dorsetshire; and Grindon says it is frequent in Ireland, abundant in Arran,
and extends on the western side of the British island from Cornwall to Cape
Wrath. My epithet, Pallida, is secure, and simple, wherever the plant is
found.
[Illustration: FIG. III.]
5. Pinguicula Minima: Least Butterwort; in D. 1021 called Villosa, the
_scape_ of it being hairy. I have not yet got rid of this absurd word
'scape,' meaning, in botanist's Latin, the flower-stalk of a flower growing
out of a cluster of leaves on the ground. It is a bad corruption of
'sceptre,' and especially false and absurd, because a true sceptre is
necessarily branched.[15] In 'Proserpina,' when it is spoken of
distinctively, it is called 'virgula' (see vol. i., pp. 146, 147, 151,
152). The hairs on the virgula are in this instance so minute, that even
with a lens I cannot see them in the Danish plate: of which Fig. 3 is a
rough translation into woodcut, to show the grace and mien of the little
thing. The trine leaf cluster is characteristic, and the folding up of the
leaf edges. The flower, in the Danish plate, full purple. Abundant in east
of _Finmark_ (Finland?), but _always growing in marsh moss_, (Sphagnum
palustre).
6. I call it 'Minima' only, as the least of the five here named; without
putting forward any claim for it to be the smallest pinguicula that ever
was or will be. In such sense only, the epithets minima or maxima are to be
understood when used in 'Proserpina': and so also, every statement and
every principle is only to be understood as true or tenable, respecting the
plants which the writer has seen, and which he is sure that the reader can
easily see: liable to modification to any extent by wider experience; but
better first learned securely within a narrow fence, and afterwards trained
or fructified, along more complex trellises.
7. And indeed my readers--at least, my newly found readers--must note
always that the only power which I claim for any of my books, is that of
being right and true as far as they reach. None of them pretend to be
Kosmoses;--none to be systems of Positivism or Negativism, on which the
earth is in future to swing instead of on its old worn-out poles;--none of
them to be works of genius;--none of them to be, more than all true work
_must_ be, pious;--and none to be, beyond the power of common people's
eyes,[16] ears, and noses, 'æsthetic.' They tell you that the world is _so_
big, and can't be made bigger--that you yourself are also so big, and can't
be made bigger, however you puff or bloat yourself; but that, on modern
mental nourishment, you may very easily be made smaller. They tell you that
two and two are four, that ginger is hot in the mouth, that roses are red,
and smuts black. Not themselves assuming to be pious, they yet assure you
that there is such a thing as piety in the world, and that it is wiser than
impiety; and not themselves pretending to be works of genius, they yet
assure you that there is such a thing as genius in the world, and that it
is meant for the light and delight of the world.
8. Into these repetitions of remarks on my work, often made before, I have
been led by an unlucky author who has just sent me his book, advising me
that it is "neither critical nor sentimental" (he had better have said in
plain English "without either judgment or feeling"), and in which nearly
the first sentence I read is--"Solomon with all his acuteness was not wise
enough to ... etc., etc., etc." ('give the Jews the British constitution,'
I believe the man means.) He is not a whit more conceited than Mr. Herbert
Spencer, or Mr. Goldwin Smith, or Professor Tyndall,--or any lively London
apprentice out on a Sunday; but this general superciliousness with respect
to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his politics, characteristic of the modern
Cockney, Yankee, and Anglicised Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for
us of the old school, who were well whipped when we were young; and have
been in the habit of occasionally ascertaining our own levels as we grew
older, and of recognizing that, here and there, somebody stood higher, and
struck harder.
9. A difficult thing to deal with, I feel more and more, hourly, even to
the point of almost ceasing to write; not only every feeling I have, but,
of late, even _every word I use_, being alike inconceivable to the
insolence, and unintelligible amidst the slang, of the modern London
writers. Only in the last magazine I took up, I found an article by Mr.
Goldwin Smith on the Jews (of which the gist--as far as it had any--was
that we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of which I
found the word 'tribal' repeated about ten times in every page. Now, if
'tribe' makes 'tribal,' tube must make tubal, cube, cubal, and gibe, gibal;
and I suppose we shall next hear of tubal music, cubal minerals, and gibal
conversation! And observe how all this bad English leads instantly to
blunder in thought, prolonged indefinitely. The Jewish Tribes are not
separate races, but the descendants of brothers. The Roman Tribes,
political divisions; essentially Trine: and the whole force of the word
Tribune vanishes, as soon as the ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy
innovation by the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of
mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called 'tesseral';
the writer being much too fine to call them 'four-al,' and too much bent on
distinguishing himself from all previous writers to call them cubic.
10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible schoolmasters, are to do in
this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, which rains fools upon them like frogs,
I can no more with any hope or patience conceive;--but this finally I
repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written in honest English,
of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour of a little
finer or Elizabethan quality: and that the things they tell you are
comprehensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent person; and
_accurate_, to a degree which the accepted methods of modern science
cannot, in my own particular fields, approach.
11. Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for immediate instance, my
extrication for him, from among the uvularias, of these five species of the
Butterwort; which, being all that need be distinctly named and remembered,
_do_ need to be first carefully distinguished, and then remembered in their
companionship. So alike are they, that Gerarde makes no distinction among
them; but masses them under the general type of the frequent English one,
described as the second kind of his promiscuous group of 'Sanicle,' "which
Clusius calleth Pinguicula; not before his time remembered, hath sundry
small thick leaves, fat and full of juice, being broad towards the root and
sharp towards the point, of a faint green colour, and bitter in taste; out
of the middest whereof sprouteth or shooteth up a naked slender stalke nine
inches long, every stalke bearing one flower and no more, sometimes white,
and sometimes of a bluish purple colour, fashioned like unto the common
Monkshoods" (he means Larkspurs) "called Consolida Regalis, having the like
spur or Lark's heel attached thereto." Then after describing a third kind
of Sanicle--(Cortusa Mathioli, a large-leaved Alpine Primula,) he goes on:
"These plants are strangers in England; their natural country is the alpish
mountains of Helvetia. They grow in my garden, where they flourish
exceedingly, except Butterwoort, which groweth in our English _squally_ wet
grounds,"--('Squally,' I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson does
not give this sense; but one of his quotations from Ben Jonson touches it
nearly: "Take heed that their new flowers and sweetness do not as much
corrupt as the others' dryness and squalor,"--and note farther that the
word 'squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, but the Arabic
'Chuaul' with an s prefixed:--the English word, a form of 'squeal,' meaning
a child's cry, from Gothic 'Squæla' and Icelandic 'squilla,' would scarcely
have been made an adjective by Gerarde),--"and will not yield to any
culturing or transplanting: it groweth especially in a field called Cragge
Close, and at Crosbie Ravenswaithe, in Westmerland; (West-_mere_-land you
observe, not mor) upon Ingleborough Fells, twelve miles from Lancaster, and
by Harwoode in the same county near to Blackburn: ten miles from Preston,
in Anderness, upon the bogs and marish ground, and in the boggie meadows
about Bishop's-Hatfield, and also in the fens in the way to Wittles Meare"
(Roger Wildrake's Squattlesea Mere?) "from Fendon, in Huntingdonshire."
Where doubtless Cromwell ploughed it up, in his young days, pitilessly; and
in nowise pausing, as Burns beside his fallen daisy.
12. Finally, however, I believe we may accept its English name of
'Butterwort' as true Yorkshire, the more enigmatic form of 'Pigwilly'
preserving the tradition of the flowers once abounding, with softened Latin
name, in Pigwilly bottom, close to Force bridge, by Kendal. Gerarde draws
the English variety as "Pinguicula sive Sanicula Eboracensis,--Butterwoort,
or Yorkshire Sanicle;" and he adds: "The husbandmen's wives of Yorkshire do
use to anoint the dugs of their kine with the fat and oilous juice of the
herb Butterwort when they be bitten of any venomous worm, or chapped,
rifted and hurt by any other means."
13. In Lapland it is put to much more certain use; "it is called Tätgrass,
and the leaves are used by the inhabitants to make their 'tät miolk,' a
preparation of milk in common use among them. Some fresh leaves are laid
upon a filter, and milk, yet warm from the reindeer, is poured over them.
After passing quickly through the filter, this is allowed to rest for one
or two days until it becomes ascescent,[17] when it is found not to have
separated from the whey, and yet to have attained much greater tenacity and
consistence than it would have done otherwise. The Laplanders and Swedes
are said to be extremely fond of this milk, which when once made, it is not
necessary to renew the use of the leaves, for we are told that a spoonful
of it will turn another quantity of warm milk, and make it like the
first."[18] (Baxter, vol. iii., No. 209.)
14. In the same page, I find quoted Dr. Johnston's observation that "when
specimens of this plant were somewhat rudely pulled up, the flower-stalk,
previously erect, almost immediately began to bend itself backwards, and
formed a more or less perfect segment of a circle; and so also, if a
specimen is placed in the Botanic box, you will in a short time find that
the leaves have curled themselves backwards, and now conceal the root by
their revolution."
I have no doubt that this elastic and wiry action is partly connected with
the plant's more or less predatory or fly-trap character, in which these
curiously degraded plants are associated with Drosera. I separate them
therefore entirely from the Bladderworts, and hold them to be a link
between the Violets and the Droseraceæ, placing them, however, with the
Cytherides, as a sub-family, for their beautiful colour, and because they
are indeed a grace and delight in ground which, but for them, would be
painfully and rudely desolate.
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