To say that a plant can melt ice is to assert a miracle seemingly too
great for even Nature’s powers to compass, but a traveler lately
returned from the Alps has witnessed this wonderful phenomenon, while
Grant Allen and other authorities confirm the fact that the Alpine
Soldanella melts for its blossom a passage through the ice by power of
its own internal heat.
The majority of tourists visit the Alps in August; therefore they miss a
rare sight, that of a daring little shrub opening its fringed blue buds
in the very middle of the snow sheet, and often showing its slender head
above a layer of ice, in the most incredible fashion.
We may regard the Alps as unpeopled solitudes, but to Alpine plants they
are a veritable world of competing life types.
Those only fitted for the struggle survive.
The botanists tell us that the Soldanella is heavily handicapped in the
race. In the first place, it is obliged to eke out a livelihood in the
mountain belt just below the snow line; further, it is a very low
growing variety, and is quickly obscured and overtopped by the dense and
rapid growth of its taller rivals; hence its anxiety to seize its one
chance in life at the earliest possible moment.
To attain the end of its being, the perpetuation of its species, it must
steal a march upon its companions, as it were, and show itself while
they are still locked in sleep, and when its insect fertilizers, fresh
from their cocoons, can see and visit it.
To accomplish its purpose it has made ample preparations.
All through the previous summer its round leaves, admirably fitted to
their purpose, have been spread to the mountain sun and gathered in the
fuel to be burned later on.
When winter arrives the leaves had grown thick in rich material and so
leathery that no amount of snow could injure them.
The first warmth of spring melting the edges of the snow sheet sends the
moisture trickling down to the Soldanella’s roots. This, acting upon
them as water upon malting barley, brings about germination.
The plant, absorbing the oxygen in the air under the ice and combining
it with the fuel in its own substance, melts its way into the open air.
A fragile flower forcing its way through a solid crust of ice.
Literally, not metaphorically, a slow combustion store.
This novel feat is accomplished every season, yet comparatively few
observers note it.
Louise Jamison.
THE HUMMINGBIRDS.
_Maxime miranda in minimus!_
Minutest of the feathered kind,
Possessing every charm combined,
Nature, in forming thee, designed
That thou shouldst be,
A proof within how little space
She can comprise such perfect grace,
Rendering the lovely, fairy race
Beauty’s epitome.
—_Charlotte Smith._