suffice to give it a distinct claim to respectful attention; but
Rafflesia possesses many other sterling qualities far more calculated
than simple bigness to endear it to a large and varied circle of
insect acquaintances. The oddest thing about it, indeed, is the fact
that it is a deliberately deceptive and alluring blossom. As soon
as it was first discovered, Dr. Arnold noticed that it possessed a
very curious carrion smell, exactly like that of putrefying meat. He
also observed that this smell attracted flies in large numbers by
false pretences to settle in the centre of the cup. But it is only
of late years that the real significance and connection of these
curious facts has come to be perceived. We now know that Rafflesia is
a flower which wickedly and feloniously lays itself out to deceive
the confiding meat-flies and to starve their helpless infants in the
midst of apparent plenty. The majority of legitimate flowers (if I
may be allowed the expression) get themselves decently fertilized
by bees and butterflies, who may be considered as representing the
regular trade, and who carry the fecundating pollen on their heads
and proboscises from one blossom to another, while engaged in their
usual business of gathering honey every day from every opening
flower. But Rafflesia, on the contrary, has positively acquired a
fallacious external resemblance to raw meat, and a decidedly high
flavor, on purpose to take in the too trustful Sumatran flies.
When a fly sights and scents one, he (or rather she) proceeds at
once to settle in the cup, and there lay a number of eggs in what
it naturally regards as a very fine decaying carcass. Then, having
dusted itself over in the process with plenty of pollen from this
first flower, it flies away confidingly to the next promising bud,
in search both of food for itself and of a fitting nursery for
its future little ones. In doing so, it of course fertilizes all
the blossoms that it visits, one after another, by dusting them
successively with each other’s pollen. When the young grubs are
hatched out, however, they discover the base deception all too late,
and perish miserably in their fallacious bed, the hapless victims of
misplaced parental confidence. Even as Zeuxis deceived the very birds
with his painted grapes, so Rafflesia deceives the flies themselves
by its ingenious mimicry of a putrid beefsteak. In the fierce
competition of tropical life, it has found out by simple experience
that dishonesty is the best policy.
The general principle which this strange flower illustrates in so
striking a fashion is just this. Most common flowers have laid
themselves out to attract bees, and so a bee flower forms our human
ideal of central typical blossom: it looks, in short, we think, as
a flower ought to look. But there are some originally minded and
eccentric plants which have struck out a line for themselves, and
taken to attracting sundry casual flies, wasps, midges, beetles,
snails, or even birds, which take the place of bees as their regular
fertilizers; and it is these Bohemians of the vegetable world that
make up what we all consider as the queerest and most singular
of all flowers. They adapt their appearance and structure to the
particular tastes and habits of their chosen guests.
Most of the flowers specially affected by carrion flies have a lurid
red color and a distinct smell of bad meat. Few of them, however,
are quite so cruel in their habits as Rafflesia. For the most part,
they attract the insects by their appearance and odor, but reward
their services with a little honey and other allurements. This is
the case with the curious English fly-orchid, whose dull purple lip
is covered with tiny drops of nectar, licked off by the fertilizing
flies. The very malodorous carrion-flowers (or stapelias) are visited
by blue-bottles and flesh-flies, while an allied form actually sets a
trap for the fly’s proboscis, which catches the insect by its hairs,
and compels him to give a sharp pull in order to free himself: this
pull dislodges the pollen, and so secures cross-fertilization. The
Alpine butterwort sets a somewhat similar gin so vigorously that when
a weak fly is caught in it he can not disengage himself, and there
perishes wretchedly, like a hawk in a keeper’s trap.
The south European birthwort, a very lurid-looking and fly-enticing
flower, has a sort of cornucopia-shaped tube, lined with long hairs,
which all point inward, and so allow small midges to creep down
readily enough, after the fashion of an eel-buck or lobster-pot. “Sed
revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras”--to get out again is
the great difficulty. Try as they will, the little prisoners can not
crawl back upward against the downward-pointing hairs. Accordingly,
they are forced by circumstances over which they have no control to
walk aimlessly up and down their prison yard, fertilizing the little
knobby surface of the seed-vessel from another flower. But as soon
as the seeds are all impregnated, the stamens begin to shed their
pollen, and dust over the gnats with copious powder. Then the hairs
all wither up, and the gnats, released from their lobster-pot prison,
fly away once more on the same fool’s errand. Before doing so,
however, they make a good meal off the pollen that covers the floor,
though they still carry away a great many grains on their own wings
and bodies.
A very similar but much larger fly-cage is set by our common wild
arum, or cuckoo-pint. This familiar big spring flower exhales a
disagreeable fleshy odor, which, by its meat-like flavor, attracts a
tiny midge with beautiful iridescent wings and a very poetical name,
Psychoda. As in most other cases where flies are specially invited,
the color of the cuckoo-pint is usually a dull and somewhat livid
purple. A palisade of hairs closes the neck of the funnel-shaped
blossom, and repeats the lobster-pot tactics of the entirely
unconnected south European birthwort. The little flies, entering by
this narrow and stockaded door, fertilize the future red berries
with pollen brought from their last prison, and are then rewarded
for their pains by a tiny drop of honey, which slowly oozes from the
middle of each embryo fruitlet as soon as it is duly impregnated.
Afterward, the pollen is shed upon their backs by the bursting of the
pollen-bag; the hairs wither up, and open the previously barricaded
exit, and the midges issue forth in search of a new prison and a
second drop of honey.
From plants that imprison insects to plants that devour insects alive
is a natural transition. The giant who keeps a dungeon is first
cousin to the ogre who swallows down his captives entire. And yet the
subject is really too serious a one for jesting; there is something
too awful and appalling in this contest of the unconscious and
insentient with the living and feeling, of a lower vegetative form
of life with a higher animated form, that it always makes me shudder
slightly to think of it.
On most English peaty patches there grows a little reddish-leaved
odd-looking plant known as sundew. It is but an inconspicuous small
weed, and yet literary and scientific honors have been heaped upon
its head to an extent almost unknown in the case of any other member
of the British floral commonwealth. Mr. Swinburne has addressed an
ode to it, and Mr. Darwin has written a learned book about it. Its
portrait has been sketched by innumerable artists, and its biography
narrated by innumerable authors. And all this attention has been
showered upon it, not because it is beautiful, or good, or modest,
or retiring, but simply and solely because it is atrociously and
deliberately wicked. Sundew, in fact, is the best known and most
easily accessible of the carnivorous and insectivorous plants.
The leaf of the sundew is round and flat, and it is covered by a
number of small red glands, which act as the attractive advertisement
to the misguided midges. Their knobby ends are covered with a
glutinous secretion, which glistens like honey in the sunlight, and
so gains for the plant its common English name. But the moment a
hapless fly, attracted by hopes of meat or nectar, settles quietly in
its midst, on hospitable thoughts intent, the viscid liquid holds him
tight immediately, and clogs his legs and wings, so that he is snared
exactly as a peregrine is snared with bird-lime. Then the leaf, with
all its “red-lipped mouths,” closes over him slowly but surely,
and crushes him by folding its edges inward gradually toward the
centre. The fly often lingers long with ineffectual struggles, while
the cruel crawling leaf pours forth a digestive fluid--a vegetable
gastric juice, as it were--and dissolves him alive piecemeal in its
hundred clutching suckers.
Our little English insectivorous plants, however (we have at least
five or six such species in our own islands), are mere clumsy
bunglers compared to the great and highly developed insect-eaters of
the tropics, which stand to them in somewhat the same relation as the
Bengal tiger stands to the British wildcat or the skulking weasel.
The Indian pitcher-plants or Nepenthes bear big pitchers of very
classical shapes, closed in the early state with a lid, which lifts
itself and opens the pitcher as soon as the plant has fully completed
its insecticidal arrangements. The details of the trap vary somewhat
in the different species, but as a whole the _modus operandi_ of the
plant is somewhat after this atrocious fashion. The pitcher contains
a quantity of liquid, that of the sort appropriately known as the
Rajah holding as much as a quart; and the insect, attracted in most
cases by some bright color, crawls down the sticky side, quaffs the
unkind Nepenthe, and forgets his troubles forthwith in the vat of
oblivion prepared for him beneath by the delusive vase. A slimy Lethe
flows over his dissolving corse, and the relentless pitcher-plant
sucks his juices to supply his own fibres with the necessary
nitrogenous materials.
The California pitcher-plant, or Darlingtonia, is a member of a
totally distinct family, which has independently hit upon the same
device in the Western world as the Indian Nepenthes in the Eastern
Hemisphere. The pitcher in this case, though differently produced,
is hooded and lidded like its Oriental analogue; but the inside of
the hood is furnished with short hairs, all pointing inward, and
legibly inscribed (to the botanical eye) with the appropriate motto:
“Vestigia nulla retrorsum.” The whole arrangement is colored dingy
orange, so as to attract the attention of flies; and it contains a
viscid digestive fluid in which the flies are first drowned and then
slowly melted and assimilated. The pitchers are often found half full
of dead and decaying assorted insects.
There are a great many more of these highly developed insect-eaters,
such as the Guiana heliamphora (more classical shapes), the
Australian cephalotus, and the American side-saddle flowers, and
they all without exception grow in very wet and boggy places, like
the English sundews, butterworts, and bladderworts. The reason so
many marsh plants have taken to these strange insect-eating habits
is simply that their roots are often badly supplied with manure
or ammonia in any form; and, as no plant can get on without these
necessaries of life (in the strictest sense), only those marshy weeds
have any chance of surviving which can make up in one way or another
for the native deficiencies of their situation. The sundews show us,
as it were, the first stage in the acquisition of these murderous
habits; the pitcher-plants are the abandoned ruffians which have
survived among all their competitors in virtue of their exceptional
ruthlessness and deceptive coloration. I ought to add that in all
cases the pitchers are not flowers, but highly modified and altered
leaves, though in many instances they are quite as beautifully
colored as the largest and handsomest exotic orchids.
The principle of Venus’s Fly-trap is somewhat different, though its
practice is equally nefarious. This curious marsh-plant, instead of
setting hocussed bowls of liquid for its victims, like a Florentine
of the Fourteenth Century, lays a regular gin or snare for them on
the same plan as a common snapping rat-trap. The end of the leaf
is divided into two folding halves by the midrib, and on each half
are three or five highly sensitive hairs. The moment one of these
hairs is touched by a fly, the two halves come together, inclosing
the luckless insect between them. As if on purpose to complete the
resemblance to a rat-trap, too, the edges of the leaf are formed of
prickly jagged teeth, which fit in between one another when the gin
shuts, and so effectually cut off the insect’s retreat. The plant
then sucks up the juices of the fly; and as soon as it has fully
digested them, the leaf opens automatically once more, and resets
the trap for another victim. It is an interesting fact that this
remarkable insectivore appears to be still a new and struggling
species, or else an old type on the very point of extinction,
for it is only found in a few bogs over a very small area in the
neighborhood of Wilmington, South California.
ATHENA IN THE EARTH
--JOHN RUSKIN
The spirit in the plant--that is to say, its power of gathering dead
matter out of the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own chosen
shape--is, of course, strongest at the moment of its flowering, for
it then not only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy.
And where this life is in it at full power, its form becomes invested
with aspects that are chiefly delightful to our own human passions;
namely, first, with the loveliest outlines of shape; and, secondly,
with the most brilliant phases of the primary colors, blue, yellow,
and red or white, the unison of all; and, to make it all more
strange, this time of peculiar and perfect glory is associated with
relations of the plants or blossoms to each other, correspondent to
the joy of love in human creatures, and having the same object in the
continuance of the race. Only, with respect to plants, as animals, we
are wrong in speaking as if the object of this strong life were only
the bequeathing of itself. The flower is the end or proper object
of the seed, not the seed of the flower. The reason for seeds is
that flowers may be; not the reason of flowers that seeds may be.
The flower itself is the creature which the spirit makes; only, in
connection with its perfectness, is placed the giving birth to its
successor.
The main fact, then, about a flower is that it is the part of the
plant’s form developed at the moment of its intensest life: and this
inner rapture is usually marked externally for us by the flush of one
or more of the primary colors. What the character of the flower shall
be depends entirely upon the portion of the plant into which this
rapture of spirit has been put. Sometimes the life is put into its
outer sheath, and then the outer sheath becomes white and pure, and
full of strength and grace; sometimes the life is put into the common
leaves, just under the blossom, and they become scarlet or purple;
sometimes the life is put into the stalks of the flower, and they
flush blue; sometimes in its outer inclosure or calyx; mostly into
its inner cup; but, in all cases, the presence of the strongest life
is asserted by characters in which the human sight takes pleasure,
and which seemed prepared with distinct reference to us, or rather,
bear, in being delightful, evidence of having been produced by the
power of the same spirit as our own.
With the early serpent-worship there was associated another--that
of the groves--of which you will find the evidence exhaustively
collected in Mr. Fergusson’s work. This tree-worship may have taken
a dark form when associated with the Draconian one; or opposed,
as in Judea, to a purer faith; but in itself, I believe, it was
always healthy, and though it retains little definite hieroglyphic
power in subsequent religion, it becomes, instead of symbolic, real;
the flowers and trees are themselves beheld and beloved with a
half-worshiping delight, which is always noble and healthful.
And it is among the most notable indications of the volition of the
animating power that we find the ethical signs of good and evil set
on these also, as well as upon animals; the venom of the serpent,
and in some respects its image also, being associated even with
the passionless growth of the leaf out of the ground; while the
distinctions of species seem appointed with more definite ethical
address to the intelligence of man as their material products become
more useful to him.
I can easily show this and, at the same time, make clear the relation
to other plants of the flowers which especially belong to Athena,
by examining the natural myths in the groups of the plants which
would be used at any country dinner over which Athena would, in her
simplest household authority, cheerfully rule, here, in England.
Suppose Horace’s favorite dish of beans with the bacon; potatoes;
some savory stuffing of onions and herbs with the meat; celery, and
a radish or two, with the cheese; nuts and apples for dessert, and
brown bread. The beans are, from earliest time, the most important
and interesting of the seeds of the great tribe of plants from which
came the Latin and French name for all kitchen vegetables--things
that are gathered with the hand--podded seeds that can not be reaped,
or beaten, or shaken down, but must be gathered green. “Leguminous”
plants, all of them having flowers like butterflies, seeds in
(frequently pendent) pods--“lætum silique quassante legumen”--smooth
and tender leaves, divided into many minor ones--strange adjuncts of
tendril, for climbing (and sometimes of thorn)--exquisitely sweet,
yet pure, scents of blossom, and almost always harmless, if not
serviceable seeds. It is of all tribes of plants the most definite;
its blossoms being entirely limited in their parts, and not passing
into other forms. It is also the most usefully extended in range
and scale; familiar in the height of the forest--acacia, laburnum,
Judas-tree; familiar in the sown field--bean and vetch and pea;
familiar in the pasture--in every form of clustered clover and sweet
trefoil tracery; the most entirely serviceable and human of all
orders of plants.
Next, in the potato, we have the scarcely innocent underground stem
of one of a tribe set aside for evil;[6] having the deadly nightshade
for its queen, and including the henbane, the witch’s mandrake, and
the worst natural curse of modern civilization--tobacco. And the
strange thing about this tribe is that, though thus set aside for
evil, they are not a group distinctly separate from those that are
happier in function. There is nothing in other tribes of plants
like the bean blossom; but there is another family with forms and
structure closely connected with this venomous one. Examine the
purple and yellow bloom of the common hedge nightshade; you will
find it constructed exactly like some of the forms of the cyclamen;
and, getting this clew, you will find at last the whole poisonous and
terrible group to be--sisters of the primulas!
The nightshades are, in fact, primroses with a curse upon them; and
a sign set in their petals by which the deadly and condemned flowers
may always be known from the innocent ones--that the stamens of the
nightshades are between the lobes, and of the primulas, opposite the
lobes of the corolla.
Next, side by side, in the celery and radish, you have the two great
groups of umbelled and cruciferous plants; alike in conditions of
rank among herbs: both flowering in clusters; but the umbelled
group, flat, the crucifers, in spires: both of them mean and poor in
blossom, and losing what beauty they have by too close crowding; both
of them having the most curious influence on human character in the
temperate zones of the earth, from the days of the parsley crown and
hemlock drink, and mocked Euripidean chervil, until now: but chiefly
among the northern nations, being especially plants that are of some
humble beauty, and (the crucifers) of endless use, when they are
chosen and cultivated; but that run to wild waste, and are signs of
neglected ground, in their rank or ragged leaves, and meagre stalks,
and pursed or podded seed-clusters. Capable, even under cultivation,
of no perfect beauty, though reaching some subdued delightfulness in
the lady’s smock and the wall-flower; for the most part, they have
every floral quality meanly, and in vain--they are white, without
purity; golden, without preciousness; redundant, without richness;
divided, without fineness; massive, without strength; and slender,
without grace. Yet think over that useful vulgarity of theirs; and of
the relations of German and English peasant character to its food of
kraut and cabbage (as of Arab character to its food of palm-fruit),
and you will begin to feel what purposes of the forming spirit are in
these distinctions of species.
Next we take the nuts and apples--the nuts representing one of the
groups of catkined trees whose blossoms are only tufts and dust; and
the other, the rose tribe, in which fruit and flower alike have been
the types, to the highest races of men, of all passionate temptation
or pure delight, from the coveting of Eve to the crowning of the
Madonna above the
“Rosa sempiterna
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol.”
We have now no time for these; we must go on to the humblest group of
all, yet the most wonderful, that of the grass, which has given us
our bread; and from that we will go back to the herbs.
The vast family of plants which, under rain, make the earth green for
man; and, under sunshine, give him bread; and, in their springing
in the early year, mixed with their native flowers, have given us
(far more than the new leaves of trees) the thought and word of
“spring,” divide themselves broadly into three great groups--the
grasses, sedges, and rushes. The grasses are essentially a clothing
for healthy and pure ground, watered by occasional rain, but in
itself dry and fit for all cultivated pasture and corn. They are
distinctively plants with round and pointed stems, which have long,
green, flexible leaves, and heads of seed independently emerging
from them. The sedges are essentially the clothing of waste and
more or less poor or uncultivable soils, coarse in their structure,
frequently triangular in stem--hence called “acute” by Virgil--and
with their heads of seed not extricated from their leaves. Now, in
both the sedges and grasses, the blossom has a common structure,
though undeveloped in the sedges, but composed always of groups of
double husks, which have mostly a spinous process in the centre,
sometimes projecting into a long awn or beard; this central process
being characteristic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, as if a
moss were a kind of ear of corn made permanently green on the ground,
and with a new and distinct fructification. But the rushes differ
wholly from the sedge and grass in their blossom structure. It is not
a dual cluster, but a twice threefold one, so far separate from the
grasses and so closely connected with a higher order of plants that
I think you will find it convenient to group the rushes at once with
that higher order, to which, if you will for the present let me give
the general name of Drosidæ, or dew-plants, it will enable me to say
what I have to say of them much more shortly and clearly.
These Drosidæ, then, are plants delighting in interrupted
moisture--moisture which comes either partially or at certain
seasons--into dry ground. They are not water-plants; but the signs
of water resting among dry places. Many of the true water-plants
have triple blossoms, with a small triple calyx holding them; in the
Drosidæ, the floral spirit passes into the calyx also, and the entire
flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem laterally,
as if it were the first of flowers, and had made its way to the light
by force through the unwilling green. They are often required to
retain moisture or nourishment for the future blossom through long
times of drought; and this they do in bulbs under ground, of which
some become a rude and simple, but most wholesome, food for man.
So now, observe, you are to divide the whole family of the
herbs of the field into three great groups--Drosidæ, Carices,
Gramineæ--dew-plants, sedges, and grasses. Then the Drosidæ are
divided into five great orders--lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, irids,
and rushes. No tribes of flowers have had so great, so varied, or so
healthy an influence on man as this great group of Drosidæ, depending
not so much on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, or the
radiance of others, as on the strength and delicacy of the substance
of their petals; enabling them to take forms of faultless elastic
curvature, either in cups, as the crocus, or expanding bells, as
the true lily, or heath-like bells, as the hyacinth, or bright and
perfect stars, like the star of Bethlehem, or, when they are affected
by the strange reflex of the serpent nature which forms the labiate
group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely fantastic
symmetry in the gladiolus. Put by their side their Nereid sisters,
the water-lilies, and you have in them the origin of the loveliest
forms of ornamental design and the most powerful floral myths yet
recognized among human spirits, born by the streams of the Ganges,
Nile, Arno, and Avon.