Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  The ascidian, however, in mature life, has grown degraded and fallen from his high estate, owing to his bad habit of rooting himself to a rock and there settling down into a mere sedentary swallower of passing morsels — a blind, handless, footless, and degenerate thing. In his later shape he is but a sack fixed to a stone, and with all his limbs and higher sense-organs so completely atrophied that only his earlier history allows us to recognise him as a vertebrate by descent at all. He is in fact a representative of retrogressive development. The tadpole, on the contrary, goes on swimming about freely, and keeping the use of its eyes, till at last a pair of hind legs and then a pair of fore legs begin to bud out from its side, and its tail fades away, and its gills disappear, and air-breathing lungs take their place, and it boldly hops on shore a fully evolved tailless amphibian.

  There is, however, one interesting question about these two larvæ which I should much like to solve. The ascidian has only one eye inside its useless brain, while the tadpole and all other vertebrates have two from the very first. Now which of us most nearly represents the old mud-loving vertebrate ancestor in this respect? Have two original organs coalesced in the young ascidian, or has one organ split up into a couple with the rest of the class? I think the latter is the true supposition, and for this reason: In our heads, and those of all vertebrates, there is a curious cross-connection between the eyes and the brain, so that the right optic nerve goes to the left side of the brain and the left optic nerve goes to the right side. In higher animals, this ‘decussation,’ as anatomists call it, affects all the sense-organs except those of smell; but in fishes it only affects the eyes. Now, as the young ascidian has retained the ancestral position of his almost useless eye so steadily, it is reasonable to suppose that he has retained its other peculiarities as well. May we not conclude, therefore, that the primitive vertebrate had only one brain-eye; but that afterwards, as this brain-eye grew outward to the surface, it split up into two, because of the elongated and flattened form of the head in swimming animals, while its two halves still kept up a memory of their former union in the cross-connection with the opposite halves of the brain? If this be so, then we might suppose that the other organs followed suit, so as to prevent confusion in the brain between the two sides of the body; while the nose, which stands in the centre of the face, was under no liability to such error, and therefore still keeps up its primitive direct arrangement.

  It is worth noting, too, that these tadpoles, like all other very low vertebrates, are mud-haunters; and the most primitive among adult vertebrates are still cartilaginous mud-fish. Not much is known geologically about the predecessors of frogs; the tailless amphibians are late arrivals upon earth, and it may seem curious, therefore, that they should recall in so many ways the earliest ancestral type. The reason doubtless is because they are so much given to larval development. Some ancestors of theirs — primæval newts or salamanders — must have gone on for countless centuries improving themselves in their adult shape from age to age, yet bringing all their young into the world from the egg, as mere mud-fish still, in much the same state as their unimproved forefathers had done millions of æons before. Similarly, caterpillars are still all but exact patterns of the primæval insect, while butterflies are totally different and far higher creatures. Thus, in spite of adult degeneracy in the ascidian and adult progress in the frog, both tadpoles preserve for us very nearly the original form of their earliest backboned ancestor. Each individual recapitulates in its own person the whole history of evolution in its race. This is a very lucky thing for biology; since without these recapitulatory phases we could never have traced the true lines of descent in many cases. It would be a real misfortune for science if every frog had been born a typical amphibian, as some tree-toads actually are, and if every insect had emerged a fully formed adult, as some aphides very nearly do. Larvæ and embryos show us the original types of each race; adults show us the total amount of change produced by progressive or retrogressive development.

  AMONG THE HEATHER.

  This is the worst year for butterflies that I can remember. Entomologists all over England are in despair at the total failure of the insect crop, and have taken to botanising, angling, and other bad habits, in default of means for pursuing their natural avocation as beetle-stickers. Last year’s heavy rains killed all the mothers as they emerged from the chrysalis; and so only a few stray eggs have survived till this summer, when the butterflies they produce will all be needed to keep up next season’s supply. Nevertheless, I have climbed the highest down in this part of the country to-day, and come out for an airing among the heather, in the vague hope that I may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of one or two old lepidopterous favourites. I am not a butterfly-hunter myself. I have not the heart to drive pins through the pretty creatures’ downy bodies, or to stifle them with reeking chemicals; though I recognise the necessity for a hardened class who will perform that useful office on behalf of science and society, just as I recognise the necessity for slaughtermen and knackers. But I prefer personally to lie on the ground at my ease and learn as much about the insect nature as I can discover from simple inspection of the living subject as it flits airily from bunch to bunch of bright-coloured flowers.

  I suppose even that apocryphal person, the general reader, would be insulted at being told at this hour of the day that all bright-coloured flowers are fertilised by the visits of insects, whose attentions they are specially designed to solicit. Everybody has heard over and over again that roses, orchids, and columbines have acquired their honey to allure the friendly bee, their gaudy petals to advertise the honey, and their divers shapes to ensure the proper fertilisation by the correct type of insect. But everybody does not know how specifically certain blossoms have laid themselves out for a particular species of fly, beetle, or tiny moth. Here on the higher downs, for instance, most flowers are exceptionally large and brilliant; while all Alpine climbers must have noticed that the most gorgeous masses of bloom in Switzerland occur just below the snow-line. The reason is, that such blossoms must be fertilised by butterflies alone. Bees, their great rivals in honey-sucking, frequent only the lower meadows and slopes, where flowers are many and small: they seldom venture far from the hive or the nest among the high peaks and chilly nooks where we find those great patches of blue gentian or purple anemone, which hang like monstrous breadths of tapestry upon the mountain sides. This heather here, now fully opening in the warmer sun of the southern counties — it is still but in the bud among the Scotch hills, I doubt not — specially lays itself out for the bumblebee, and its masses form about his highest pasture-grounds; but the butterflies — insect vagrants that they are — have no fixed home, and they therefore stray far above the level at which bee-blossoms altogether cease to grow. Now, the butterfly differs greatly from the bee in his mode of honey-hunting; he does not bustle about in a business-like manner from one buttercup or dead-nettle to its nearest fellow; but he flits joyously, like a sauntering straggler that he is, from a great patch of colour here to another great patch at a distance, whose gleam happens to strike his roving eye by its size and brilliancy. Hence, as that indefatigable observer, Dr. Hermann Müller, has noticed, all Alpine or hill-top flowers have very large and conspicuous blossoms, generally grouped together in big clusters so as to catch a passing glance of the butterfly’s eye. As soon as the insect spies such a cluster, the colour seems to act as a stimulant to his broad wings, just as the candle-light does to those of his cousin the moth. Off he sails at once, as if by automatic action, towards the distant patch, and there both robs the plant of its honey and at the same time carries to it on his legs and head fertilising pollen from the last of its congeners which he favoured with a call. For of course both bees and butterflies stick on the whole to a single species at a time; or else the flowers would only get uselessly hybridised instead of being impregnated with pollen from other plants of their own kind. For this purpose it is that most plants lay themselves out to secure the attention of only two or thre
e varieties among their insect allies, while they make their nectaries either too deep or too shallow for the convenience of all other kinds. Nature, though eager for cross-fertilisation, abhors ‘miscegenation’ with all the bitterness of an American politician.

  Insects, however, differ much from one another in their æsthetic tastes, and flowers are adapted accordingly to the varying fancies of the different kinds. Here, for example, is a spray of common white galium, which attracts and is fertilised by small flies, who generally frequent white blossoms. But here, again, not far off, I find a luxuriant mass of the yellow species, known by the quaint name of ‘lady’s bedstraw’ — a legacy from the old legend which represents it as having formed Our Lady’s bed in the manger at Bethlehem. Now why has this kind of galium yellow flowers, while its near kinsman yonder has them snowy white? The reason is that lady’s bedstraw is fertilised by small beetles; and beetles are known to be one among the most colour-loving races of insects. You may often find one of their number, the lovely bronze and golden-mailed rose-chafer, buried deeply in the very centre of a red garden rose, and reeling about when touched as if drunk with pollen and honey. Almost all the flowers which beetles frequent are consequently brightly decked in scarlet or yellow. On the other hand, the whole family of the umbellates, those tall plants with level bunches of tiny blossoms, like the fool’s parsley, have all but universally white petals; and Müller, the most statistical of naturalists, took the trouble to count the number of insects which paid them a visit. He found that only 14 per cent. were bees, while the remainder consisted mainly of miscellaneous small flies and other arthropodous riff-raff; whereas in the brilliant class of composites, including the asters, sunflowers, daisies, dandelions, and thistles, nearly 75 per cent. of the visitors were steady, industrious bees. Certain dingy blossoms which lay themselves out to attract wasps are obviously adapted, as Müller quaintly remarks, ‘to a less æsthetically cultivated circle of visitors.’ But the most brilliant among all insect-fertilised flowers are those which specially affect the society of butterflies; and they are only surpassed in this respect throughout all nature by the still larger and more magnificent tropical species which owe their fertilisation to humming-birds and brush-tongued lories.

  Is it not a curious, yet a comprehensible circumstance, that the tastes which thus show themselves in the development, by natural selection, of lovely flowers, should also show themselves in the marked preference for beautiful mates? Poised on yonder sprig of harebell stands a little purple-winged butterfly, one of the most exquisite among our British kinds. That little butterfly owes its own rich and delicately shaded tints to the long selective action of a million generations among its ancestors. So we find throughout that the most beautifully coloured birds and insects are always those which have had most to do with the production of bright-coloured fruits and flowers. The butterflies and rose-beetles are the most gorgeous among insects: the humming-birds and parrots are the most gorgeous among birds. Nay more, exactly like effects have been produced in two hemispheres on different tribes by the same causes. The plain brown swifts of the North have developed among tropical West Indian and South American orchids the metallic gorgets and crimson crests of the humming-bird: while a totally unlike group of Asiatic birds have developed among the rich flora of India and the Malay Archipelago the exactly similar plumage of the exquisite sun-birds. Just as bees depend upon flowers, and flowers upon bees, so the colour-sense of animals has created the bright petals of blossoms; and the bright petals have reacted upon the tastes of the animals themselves, and through their tastes upon their own appearance.

  SPECKLED TROUT.

  It is a piece of the common vanity of anglers to suppose that they know something about speckled trout. A fox might almost as well pretend that he was intimately acquainted with the domestic habits of poultry, or an Iroquois describe the customs of the Algonquins from observations made upon the specimens who had come under his scalping-knife. I will allow that anglers are well versed in the necessity for fishing up-stream rather than in the opposite direction; and I grant that they have attained an empirical knowledge of the æsthetic preferences of trout in the matter of blue duns and red palmers; but that as a body they are familiar with the speckled trout at home I deny. If you wish to learn all about the race in its own life you must abjure rod and line, and creep quietly to the side of the pools in an unfished brooklet, like this on whose bank I am now seated; and then, if you have taken care not to let your shadow fall upon the water, you may sit and watch the live fish themselves for an hour together, as they bask lazily in the sunlight, or rise now and then at cloudy moments with a sudden dart at a May-fly who is trying in vain to lay her eggs unmolested on the surface of the stream. The trout in my little beck are fortunately too small even for poachers to care for tickling them: so I am able entirely to preserve them as objects for philosophical contemplation, without any danger of their being scared away from their accustomed haunts by intrusive anglers.

  Trout always have a recognised home of their own, inhabited by a pretty fixed number of individuals. But if you catch the two sole denizens of a particular scour, you will find another pair installed in their place to-morrow. Young fry seem always ready to fill up the vacancies caused by the involuntary retirement of their elders. Their size depends almost entirely upon the quantity of food they can get; for an adult fish may weigh anything at any time of his life, and there is no limit to the dimensions they may theoretically attain. Mr. Herbert Spencer, who is an angler as well as a philosopher, well observes that where the trout are many they are generally small; and where they are large they are generally few. In the mill-stream down the valley they measure only six inches, though you may fill a basket easily enough on a cloudy day; but in the canal reservoir, where there are only half-a-dozen fish altogether, a magnificent eight-pounder has been taken more than once. In this way we can understand the origin of the great lake trout, which weigh sometimes forty pounds. They are common trout which have taken to living in broader waters, where large food is far more abundant, but where shoals of small fish would starve. The peculiarities thus impressed upon them have been handed down to their descendants, till at length they have become sufficiently marked to justify us in regarding them as a separate species. But it is difficult to say what makes a species in animals so very variable as fish. There are, in fact, no less than twelve kinds of trout wholly peculiar to the British Islands, and some of these are found in very restricted areas. Thus, the Loch Stennis trout inhabits only the tarns of Orkney; the Galway sea trout lives nowhere but along the west coast of Ireland; the gillaroo never strays out of the Irish loughs; the Killin charr is confined to a single sheet of water in Mayo; and other species belong exclusively to the Llanberis lakes, to Lough Melvin, or to a few mountain pools of Wales and Scotland. So great is the variety that may be produced by small changes of food and habitat. Even the salmon himself is only a river trout who has acquired the habit of going down to the sea, where he gets immensely increased quantities of food (for all the trout kind are almost omnivorous), and grows big in proportion. But he still retains many marks of his early existence as a river fish. In the first place, every salmon is hatched from the egg in fresh water, and grows up a mere trout. The young parr, as the salmon is called in this stage of its growth, is actually (as far as physiology goes) a mature fish, and is capable of producing milt, or male spawn, which long caused it to be looked upon as a separate species. It really represents, however, the early form of the salmon, before he took to his annual excursion to the sea. The ancestral fish, only a hundredth fraction in weight of his huge descendant, must have somehow acquired the habit of going seaward — possibly from a drying up of his native stream in seasons of drought. In the sea, he found himself suddenly supplied with an unwonted store of food, and grew, like all his kind under similar circumstances, to an extraordinary size. Thus he attains, as it were, to a second and final maturity. But salmon cannot lay their eggs in the sea; or at least, if they did, the y
oung parr would starve for want of their proper food, or else be choked by the salt water, to which the old fish have acclimatised themselves. Accordingly, with the return of the spawning season there comes back an instinctive desire to seek once more the native fresh water. So the salmon return up stream to spawn, and the young are hatched in the kind of surroundings which best suit their tender gills. This instinctive longing for the old home may probably have arisen during an intermediate stage, when the developing species still haunted only the brackish water near the river mouths; and as those fish alone which returned to the head waters could preserve their race, it would soon grow hardened into a habit engrained in the nervous system, like the migration of birds or the clustering of swarming bees around their queen. In like manner the Jamaican land-crabs, which themselves live on the mountain-tops, come down every year to lay their eggs in the Caribbean; because, like all other crabs, they pass their first larval stage as swimming tadpoles, and afterwards take instinctively to the mountains, as the salmon takes to the sea. Such a habit could only have arisen by one generation after another venturing further and further inland, while always returning at the proper season to the native element for the deposition of the eggs.