most often attracts the attention of the young, the gay, the giddy, and
the thoughtless: I mean their power of mimicry in human language. And I
believe I am justified in passing it over lightly. For in fact this
power is but a very incidental result of the general intelligence of
parrots, combined with the other peculiarities of their social life and
forestine character. Dominant woodland animals, indeed, like monkeys,
parrots, toucans, and hornbills, at least if vegetarian in their
habits, are almost always gregarious, noisy, mischievous, and
imitative. And the imitation results directly from the unusual
intelligence; for, after all, what is the power of learning itself--at
least, in all save its very highest phases--but the faculty of
accurately imitating another? Monkeys for the most part imitate action
only, because they haven't very varied or flexible voices. Parrots and
many other birds, on the contrary--like the starling and still more
markedly the American mocking-bird--being endowed with considerable
flexibility of voice, imitate either songs or spoken words with great
distinctness. In the parrot the power of attention is also very
considerable, for the bird will often try over with itself repeatedly
the lesson it has set itself to learn. But people too generally forget
that at best the parrot knows only the general application of a
sentence, not the separate meanings of its component words. It knows,
for example, that 'Polly wants a lump of sugar' is a phrase often
followed by a present of food. But to believe it can understand an
abstract expression, like the famous 'By Jove! what a beastly lot of
parrots!' is to confound learning by rote with genuine comprehension. A
careful review of all the evidence makes almost every scientific
observer conclude that at most a parrot knows a word of command as a
horse knows 'Whoa!' or a dog knows the order to hunt for rats in the
wainscot.
HIGH LIFE.
Everybody knows mountain flowers are beautiful. As one rises up any
minor height in the Alps or the Pyrenees below snow-level, one notices
at once the extraordinary brilliancy and richness of the blossoms one
meets there. All nature is dressed in its brightest robes. Great belts
of blue gentian hang like a zone on the mountain slopes; masses of
yellow globe-flower star the upland pastures; nodding heads of
soldanella lurk low among the rugged boulders by the glacier's side. No
lowland blossoms have such vividness of colouring, or grow in such
conspicuous patches. To strike the eye from afar, to attract and allure
at a distance, is the great aim and end in life of the Alpine flora.
Now, why are Alpine plants so anxious to be seen of men and angels? Why
do they flaunt their golden glories so openly before the world, instead
of shrinking in modest reserve beneath their own green leaves, like the
Puritan primrose and the retiring violet? The answer is, Because of the
extreme rarity of the mountain air. It's the barometer that does it. At
first sight, I will readily admit, this explanation seems as fanciful
as the traditional connection between Goodwin Sands and Tenterden
Steeple. But, like the amateur stories in country papers, it is
'founded on fact,' for all that. (Imagine, by the way, a tale founded
entirely on fiction! How charmingly aerial!) By a roundabout road,
through varying chains of cause and effect, the rarity of the air does
really account in the long run for the beauty and conspicuousness of
the mountain flowers.
For bees, the common go-betweens of the loves of the plants, cease to
range about a thousand or fifteen hundred feet below snow-level. And
why? Because it's too cold for them? Oh, dear, no: on sunny days in
early English spring, when the thermometer doesn't rise above freezing
in the shade, you will see both the honey-bees and the great black
bumble as busy as their conventional character demands of them among
the golden cups of the first timid crocuses. Give the bee sunshine,
indeed, with a temperature just about freezing-point, and he'll flit
about joyously on his communistic errand. But bees, one must remember,
have heavy bodies and relatively small wings: in the rarefied air of
mountain heights they can't manage to support themselves in the most
literal sense. Hence their place in these high stations of the world is
taken by the gay and airy butterflies, which have lighter bodies and a
much bigger expanse of wing-area to buoy them up. In the valleys and
plains the bee competes at an advantage with the butterflies for all
the sweets of life: but in this broad sub-glacial belt on the
mountain-sides the butterflies in turn have things all their own way.
They flit about like monarchs of all they survey, without a rival in
the world to dispute their supremacy.
And how does the preponderance of butterflies in the upper regions of
the air affect the colour and brilliancy of the flowers? Simply thus.
Bees, as we are all aware on the authority of the great Dr. Watts, are
industrious creatures which employ each shining hour (well-chosen
epithet, 'shining') for the good of the community, and to the best
purpose. The bee, in fact, is the _bon bourgeois_ of the insect world:
he attends strictly to business, loses no time in wild or reckless
excursions, and flies by the straightest path from flower to flower of
the same species with mathematical precision. Moreover, he is careful,
cautious, observant, and steady-going--a model business man, in fact,
of sound middle-class morals and sober middle-class intelligence. No
flitting for him, no coquetting, no fickleness. Therefore, the flowers
that have adapted themselves to his needs, and that depend upon him
mainly or solely for fertilisation, waste no unnecessary material on
those big flaunting coloured posters which we human observers know as
petals. They have, for the most part, simple blue or purple flowers,
tubular in shape and, individually, inconspicuous in hue; and they are
oftenest arranged in long spikes of blossom to avoid wasting the time
of their winged Mr. Bultitudes. So long as they are just bright enough
to catch the bee's eye a few yards away, they are certain to receive a
visit in due season from that industrious and persistent commercial
traveller. Having a circle of good customers upon whom they can depend
with certainty for fertilisation, they have no need to waste any large
proportion of their substance upon expensive advertisements or gaudy
petals.
It is just the opposite with butterflies. Those gay and irrepressible
creatures, the fashionable and frivolous element in the insect world,
gad about from flower to flower over great distances at once, and think
much more of sunning themselves and of attracting their fellows than of
attention to business. And the reason is obvious, if one considers for
a moment the difference in the political and domestic economy of the
two opposed groups. For the honey-bees are neuters, sexless purveyors
of the hive, with no interest on earth save the storing of honey for
the common benefit of the phalanstery to which they belong. But the
butterflies are full-fledged males and females, on the hunt through the
world for suitable partners: they think far less of feeding than of
displaying their charms: a little honey to support them during their
flight is all they need:--'For the bee, a long round of ceaseless toil;
for me,' says the gay butterfly, 'a short life and a merry one.' Mr.
Harold Skimpole needed only 'music, sunshine, a few grapes.' The
butterflies are of his kind. The high mountain zone is for them a true
ball-room: the flowers are light refreshments laid out in the
vestibule. Their real business in life is not to gorge and lay by, but
to coquette and display themselves and find fitting partners.
So while the bees with their honey-bags, like the financier with his
money-bags, are storing up profit for the composite community, the
butterfly, on the contrary, lays himself out for an agreeable flutter,
and sips nectar where he will, over large areas of country. He flies
rather high, flaunting his wings in the sun, because he wants to show
himself off in all his airy beauty: and when he spies a bed of bright
flowers afar off on the sun-smitten slopes, he sails off towards them
lazily, like a grand signior who amuses himself. No regular plodding
through a monotonous spike of plain little bells for him: what he wants
is brilliant colour, bold advertisement, good honey, and plenty of it.
He doesn't care to search. Who wants his favours must make himself
conspicuous.
Now, plants are good shopkeepers; they lay themselves out strictly to
attract their customers. Hence the character of the flowers on this
beeless belt of mountain side is entirely determined by the character
of the butterfly fertilisers. Only those plants which laid themselves
out from time immemorial to suit the butterflies, in other words, have
succeeded in the long run in the struggle for existence. So the
butterfly-plants of the butterfly-zone are all strictly adapted to
butterfly tastes and butterfly fancies. They are, for the most part,
individually large and brilliantly coloured: they have lots of honey,
often stored at the base of a deep and open bell which the long
proboscis of the insect can easily penetrate: and they habitually grow
close together in broad belts or patches, so that the colour of each
reinforces and aids the colour of the others. It is this cumulative
habit that accounts for the marked flowerbed or jam-tart character
which everybody must have noticed in the high Alpine flora.
Aristocracies usually pride themselves on their antiquity: and the high
life of the mountains is undeniably ancient. The plants and animals of
the butterfly-zone belong to a special group which appears everywhere
in Europe and America about the limit of snow, whether northward or
upward. For example, I was pleased to note near the summit of Mount
Washington (the highest peak in New Hampshire) that a large number of
the flowers belonged to species well known on the open plains of
Lapland and Finland. The plants of the High Alps are found also, as a
rule, not only on the High Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Scotch
Grampians, and the Norwegian fjelds, but also round the Arctic Circle
in Europe and America. They reappear at long distances where suitable
conditions recur: they follow the snow-line as the snow-line recedes
ever in summer higher north toward the pole or higher vertically toward
the mountain summits. And this bespeaks in one way to the reasoning
mind a very ancient ancestry. It shows they date back to a very old and
cold epoch.
Let me give a single instance which strikingly illustrates the general
principle. Near the top of Mount Washington, as aforesaid, lives to
this day a little colony of very cold-loving and mountainous
butterflies, which never descend below a couple of thousand feet from
the wind-swept summit. Except just there, there are no more of there
sort anywhere about: and as far as the butterflies themselves are
aware, no others of their species exist on earth: they never have seen
a single one of their kind, save of their own little colony. One might
compare them with the Pitcairn Islanders in the South Seas--an isolated
group of English origin, cut off by a vast distance from all their
congeners in Europe or America. But if you go north some eight or nine
hundred miles from New Hampshire to Labrador, at a certain point the
same butterfly reappears, and spreads northward toward the pole in
great abundance. Now, how did this little colony of chilly insects get
separated from the main body, and islanded, as it were, on a remote
mountain-top in far warmer New Hampshire?
The answer is, they were stranded there at the end of the Glacial
epoch.
A couple of hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts--don't let us
haggle, I beg of you, over a few casual centuries--the whole of
northern Europe and America was covered from end to end, as everybody
knows, by a sheet of solid ice, like the one which Frithiof Nansen
crossed from sea to sea on his own account in Greenland. For many
thousand years, with occasional warmer spells, that vast ice-sheet
brooded, silent and grim, over the face of the two continents. Life was
extinct as far south as the latitude of New York and London. No plant
or animal survived the general freezing. Not a creature broke the
monotony of that endless glacial desert. At last, as the celestial
cycle came round in due season, fresh conditions supervened. Warmer
weather set in, and the ice began to melt. Then the plants and animals
of the sub-glacial district were pushed slowly northward by the warmth
after the retreating ice-cap. As time went on, the climate of the
plains got too hot to hold them. The summer was too much for the
glacial types to endure. They remained only on the highest mountain
peaks or close to the southern limit of eternal snow. In this way,
every isolated range in either continent has its own little colony of
arctic or glacial plants and animals, which still survive by
themselves, unaffected by intercourse with their unknown and
unsuspected fellow-creatures elsewhere.
Not only has the Glacial epoch left these organic traces of its
existence, however; in some parts of New Hampshire, where the glaciers
were unusually thick and deep, fragments of the primæval ice itself
still remain on the spots where they were originally stranded. Among
the shady glens of the white mountains there occur here and there great
masses of ancient ice, the unmelted remnant of primæval glaciers; and
one of these is so large that an artificial cave has been cleverly
excavated in it, as an attraction for tourists, by the canny Yankee
proprietor. Elsewhere the old ice-blocks are buried under the _débris_
of moraine-stuff and alluvium, and are only accidentally discovered by
the sinking of what are locally known as ice-wells. No existing
conditions can account for the formation of such solid rocks of ice at
such a depth in the soil. They are essentially glacier-like in origin
and character: they result from the pressure of snow into a crystalline
mass in a mountain valley: and they must have remained there unmelted
ever since the close of the Glacial epoch, which, by Dr. Croll's
calculations, must most probably have ceased to plague our earth some
eighty thousand years ago. Modern America, however, has no respect for
antiquity: and it is at present engaged in using up this palæocrystic
deposit--this belated storehouse of prehistoric ice--in the manufacture
of gin slings and brandy cocktails.
As one scales a mountain of moderate height--say seven or eight
thousand feet--in a temperate climate, one is sure to be struck by the
gradual diminution as one goes in the size of the trees, till at last
they tail off into mere shrubs and bushes. This diminution--an old
commonplace of tourists--is a marked characteristic of mountain plants,
and it depends, of course, in the main upon the effect of cold, and of
the wind in winter. Cold, however, is by far the more potent factor of
the two, though it is the least often insisted upon: and this can be
seen in a moment by anyone who remembers that trees shade off in just
the self-same manner near the southern limit of permanent snow in the
Arctic regions. And the way the cold acts is simply this: it nips off
the young buds in spring in exposed situations, as the chilly
sea-breeze does with coast plants, which, as we commonly but
incorrectly say, are "blown sideways" from seaward.
Of course, the lower down one gets, and the nearer to the soil, the
warmer the layer of air becomes, both because there is greater
radiation, and because one can secure a little more shelter. So, very
far north, and very near the snow-line on mountains, you always find
the vegetation runs low and stunted. It takes advantage of every crack,
every cranny in the rocks, every sunny little nook, every jutting point
or wee promontory of shelter. And as the mountain plants have been
accustomed for ages to the strenuous conditions of such cold and
wind-swept situations, they have ended, of course, by adapting
themselves to that station in life to which it has pleased the powers
that be to call them. They grow quite naturally low and stumpy and
rosette-shaped: they are compact of form and very hard of fibre: they
present no surface of resistance to the wind in any way; rounded and
boss-like, they seldom rise above the level of the rooks and stones,
whose interstices they occupy. It is this combination of characters
that makes mountain plants such favourites with florists: for they
possess of themselves that close-grown habit and that rich profusion of
clustered flowers which it is the grand object of the gardener by
artificial selection to produce and encourage.
When one talks of the 'the limit of trees' on a mountain side, however,
it must be remembered that the phrase is used in a strictly human or
Pickwickian sense, and that it is only the size, not the type, of the
vegetation that is really in question. For trees exist even on the
highest hill-tops: only they have accommodated themselves to the
exigencies of the situation. Smaller and ever smaller species have been
developed by natural selection to suit the peculiarities of these
inclement spots. Take, for example, the willow and poplar group. Nobody
would deny that a weeping willow by an English river, or a Lombardy
poplar in an Italian avenue, was as much of a true tree as an oak or a
chestnut. But as one mounts towards the bare and wind-swept mountain
heights one finds that the willows begin to grow downward gradually.
The 'netted willow' of the Alps and Pyrenees, which shelters itself
under the lee of little jutting rocks, attains the height of only a few
inches; while the 'herbaceous willow,' common on all very high
mountains in Western Europe, is a tiny creeping weed, which nobody
would ever take for a forest tree by origin at all, unless he happened
to see it in the catkin-bearing stage, when its true nature and history
would become at once apparent to him.
Yet this little herb-like willow, one of the most northerly and hardy
of European plants, is a true tree at heart none the less for all that.
Soft and succulent as it looks in branch and leaf, you may yet count on
it sometimes as many rings of annual growth as on a lordly Scotch
fir-tree. But where? Why, underground. For see how cunning it is, this
little stunted descendant of proud forest lords: hard-pressed by
nature, it has learnt to make the best of its difficult and precarious
position. It has a woody trunk at core, like all other trees; but this
trunk never appears above the level of the soil: it creeps and roots
underground in tortuous zigzags between the crags and boulders that lie
strewn through its thin sheet of upland leaf-mould. By this simple plan
the willow manages to get protection in winter, on the same principle
as when we human gardeners lay down the stems of vines: only the willow
remains laid down all the year and always. But in summer it sends up
its short-lived herbaceous branches, covered with tiny green leaves,
and ending at last in a single silky catkin. Yet between the great
weeping willow and this last degraded mountain representative of the
same primitive type, you can trace in Europe alone at least a dozen
distinct intermediate forms, all well marked in their differences, and
all progressively dwarfed by long stress of unfavourable conditions.
From the combination of such unfavourable conditions in Arctic
countries and under the snow-line of mountains there results a curious
fact, already hinted at above, that the coldest floras are also, from
the purely human point of view, the most beautiful. Not, of course, the
most luxuriant: for lush richness of foliage and 'breadth of tropic
shade' (to quote a noble lord) one must go, as everyone knows, to the
equatorial regions. But, contrary to the common opinion, the tropics,
hoary shams, are not remarkable for the abundance or beauty of their
flowers. Quite otherwise, indeed: an unrelieved green strikes the
keynote of equatorial forests. This is my own experience, and it is
borne out (which is far more important) by Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace,
who has seen a wider range of the untouched tropics, in all four
hemispheres--northern, southern, eastern, western--than any other man,
I suppose, that ever lived on this planet. And Mr. Wallace is firm in
his conviction that the tropics in this respect are a complete fraud.
Bright flowers are there quite conspicuously absent. It is rather in
the cold and less favoured regions of the world that one must look for
fine floral displays and bright masses of colour. Close up to the
snow-line the wealth of flowers is always the greatest.
In order to understand this apparent paradox one must remember that the
highest type of flowers, from the point of view of organisation, is not
at the same time by any means the most beautiful. On the contrary,
plants with very little special adaptation to any particular insect,
like the water-lilies and the poppies, are obliged to flaunt forth in
very brilliant hues, and to run to very large sizes in order to attract
the attention of a great number of visitors, one or other of whom may
casually fertilise them; while plants with very special adaptations,
like the sage and mint group, or the little English orchids, are so
cunningly arranged that they can't fail of fertilisation at the very
first visit, which of course enables them to a great extent to dispense
with the aid of big or brilliant petals. So that, where the struggle
for life is fiercest, and adaptation most perfect, the flora will on
the whole be not most, but least, conspicuous in the matter of very
handsome flowers.
Now, the struggle for life is fiercest, and the wealth of nature is
greatest, one need hardly say, in tropical climates. There alone do we
find every inch of soil 'encumbered by its waste fertility,' as Comus
puts it; weighed down by luxuriant growth of tree, shrub, herb,
creeper. There alone do lizards lurk in every hole; beetles dwell
manifold in every cranny; butterflies flock thick in every grove; bees,
ants, and flies swarm by myriads on every sun-smitten hillside.
Accordingly, in the tropics, adaptation reaches its highest point; and
tangled richness, not beauty of colour, becomes the dominant note of
the equatorial forests. Now and then, to be sure, as you wander through
Brazilian or Malayan woods, you may light upon some bright tree clad in
scarlet bloom, or some glorious orchid drooping pendant from a bough
with long sprays of beauty: but such sights are infrequent. Green, and
green, and ever green again--that is the general feeling of the
equatorial forest: as different as possible from the rich mosaic of a
high alp in early June, or a Scotch hillside deep in golden gorse and
purple heather in broad August sunshine.
In very cold countries, on the other hand, though the conditions are
severe, the struggle for existence is not really so hard, because, in
one word, there are fewer competitors. The field is less occupied; life
is less rich, less varied, less self-strangling. And therefore
specialisation hasn't gone nearly so far in cold latitudes or
altitudes. Lower and simpler types everywhere occupy the soil; mosses,
matted flowers, small beetles, dwarf butterflies. Nature is less
luxuriant, yet in some ways more beautiful. As we rise on the mountains
the forest trees disappear, and with them the forest beasts, from bears
to squirrels; a low, wind-swept vegetation succeeds, very poor in
species, and stunted in growth, but making a floor of rich flowers
almost unknown elsewhere. The humble butterflies and beetles of the
chillier elevation produce in the result more beautiful bloom than the
highly developed honey-seekers of the richer and warmer lowlands.
Luxuriance is atoned for by a Turkey carpet of floral magnificence.