or forever, before its circumstances | against the intruder with the same happen to produce the first step toward striking unanimity as the most ancient some desirable improvement. One ex- and experienced cows. Hence I am tra petal may be invaluable to a fiverayed flower as effecting some immense saving of pollen in its fertilization; and yet the*" sport" which shall give it this sixth ray may never occur, or may be trodden down in the mire and destroyed by a passing cow. III. IN SUMMER FIELDS. inclined to suspect that the antipathy does actually result from a vaguely inherited instinct derived from the days when the ancestor of our kine was a wild bull, and the ancestor of our dogs a wolf, on the wide forest-clad plains of Central Europe. When a cow puts up its tail at sight of a dog entering its paddock at the present day, it has probably some dim instinctive consciousness that it stands in the presence of a GRIP and I have come out for a morn- dangerous hereditary foe; and as the ing stroll among the close-cropped pas- wolves could only seize with safety a tures beside the beck, in the very centre single isolated wild bull, so the cows of our green little dingle. little dingle. Here I can Here I can now usually make common cause against sit, as is my wont, on a dry knoll, and the intruding dog, turning their heads watch the birds, beasts, insects, and in one direction with very unwonted herbs of the field, while Grip scours the unanimity, till his tail finally disappears. place in every direction, intent, no under the opposite gate. Such indoubt, upon those more practical objects herited antipathies seem common and -mostly rats, I fancy-which possess a natural enough. Every species knows congenial interest for the canine intelli- and dreads the ordinary enemies of its gence. From my coign of vantage on race. Mice scamper away from the the knoll I can take care that he inflicts very smell of a cat. Young chickens no grievous bodily injury upon the run to the shelter of their mother's sheep, and that he receives none from wings when the shadow of a hawk the quick-tempered cow with the brass-passes over their heads. Mr. Darwin knobbed horns. For a kind of ances- put a small snake into a paper bag, tral feud seems to smoulder forever between Grip and the whole race of kine, breaking out every now and then into open warfare, which calls for my prompt interference, in an attitude of armed but benevolent neutrality, merely for the friendly purpose of keeping the peace. which he gave to the monkeys at the Zoo; and one monkey after another opened the bag, looked in upon the deadly foe of the quadrumanous kind, and promptly dropped the whole package with every gesture of horror and dismay. Even man himself—though his instincts have all weakened so. greatly with the growth of his more plastic intelligence, adapted to a wider and more modifiable set of external circumstances-seems to retain a vague and original terror of the serpentine form. This ancient feud, I imagine, is really ancestral, and dates many ages farther back in time than Grip's individual experiences. Cows hate dogs instinctively, from their earliest calfhood up. ward. I used to doubt once upon a time whether the hatred was not of If we think of parallel cases, it is not artificial origin and wholly induced by curious that animals should thus inthe inveterate human habit of egging stinctively recognize their natural eneon every dog to worry every other an- mies. We are not surprised that they imal that comes in its way. But I recognize their own fellows and yet tried a mild experiment one day by they must do so by means of some putting a half-grown town-bred puppy equally strange automatic and inherited into a small inclosure with some mechanism in their nervous system. hitherto unworried calves, and they all One butterfly can tell its mates at once turned to make a common headway from a thousand other species, though : it may differ from some of them only by a single spot or line, which would escape the notice of all but the most attentive observers. Must we not conclude that there are elements in the butterfly's feeble brain exactly answering to the blank picture of its specific type? So, too, must we not suppose that in every race of animals there arises a perceptive structure specially adopted to the recognition of its own kind? Babies notice human faces long before they notice any other living thing. In like manner we know that most creatures can judge instinctively of their proper food. One young bird just fledged naturally pecks at red berries; another exhibits an untaught desire to chase down grasshoppers; a third, which happens to be born an owl, turns at once to the congenial pursuit of small sparrows, mice, and frogs. Each species seems to have certain faculties so arranged that the sight of certain external objects, frequently connected with food in their ancestral experience, immediately arouses in them the appropriate actions for its capture. Mr. Douglas Spalding found that newlyhatched chickens darted rapidly and accurately at flies on the wing. When we recollect that even so late an acquisition as articulate speech in human beings has its special physical seat in the brain, it is not astonishing that complicated mechanisms should have arisen among animals for the due perception of mates, food, and foes respectively. Thus, doubtless, the serpent form has imprinted itself indelibly on the senses of monkeys, and the wolf or dog form on those of cows: so that even with a young ape or calf the sight of these their ancestral enemies at once calls up uneasy or terrified feelings in their half-developed minds. Our own infants in arms have no personal experience of the real meaning to be attached to angry tones, yet they shrink from the sound of a gruff voice even before they have learned to distinguish their nurse's face. When Grip gets among the sheep, their hereditary traits come out in a very different manner. They are by For nature and descent timid mountain animals, and they have never been accustomed to face a foe, as cows and buffaloes are wont to do, especially when in a herd together. You cannot see many traces of the original mountain life among sheep, and yet there are still a few remaining to mark their real pedigree. Mr. Herbert Spencer has noticed the fondness of lambs for frisking on a hillock, however small; and when I come to my little knoll here, I generally find it occupied by a couple, who rush away on my approach, but take their stand instead on the merest ant-hill which they can find in the field. I once knew three young goats, kids of a mountain breed, and the only elevated object in the paddock where they were kept was a single old elm stump. the possession of this stump the goats fought incessantly; and the victor would proudly perch himself on the top, with all four legs inclined inward (for the whole diameter of the tree was but some fifteen inches), maintaining himself in his place with the greatest difficulty, and butting at his two brothers until at last he lost his balance and fell. This one old stump was the sole representative in their limited experience of the rocky pinnacle upon which their forefathers kept watch like sentinels; and their instinctive yearnings prompted them to perch themselves upon the only available memento of their native haunts. Thus, too, but in a dimmer and vaguer way, the sheep, especially during his younger days, loves to revert, so far as his small opportunities permit him, to the unconsciously remembered habits of his race. But in mountain countries, every one must have noticed how the sheep at once becomes a different being. On the Welsh hills he casts away all the dull and heavy serenity of his brethren on the South Downs, and displays once more the freedom, and even the comparative boldness, of a mountain breed. A Merionethshire ewe thinks nothing of running up one side of a low-roofed barn and down the other, or of clearing a stone wall which a Leicestershire farmer would consider extravagantly high. IV. A SPRIG OF WATER CROWFOOT. Another mountain trait in the stereo-instinctive habits in altered circumtyped character of sheep is their well-stances. They are to the mental life known sequaciousness. When Grip what rudimentary organs are to the runs after them they all run away bodily structure: they remind us of an together if one goes through a certain older order of things, just as the aborgap in the hedge, every other follows; tive legs of the blind-worm show us that and if the leader jumps the beck at a he was once a lizard, and the hidden certain spot, every lamb in the flock shell of the slug that he was once a jumps in the self-same place. It is snail. said that if you hold a stick for the first sheep to leap over, and then withdraw it, all the succeeding sheep will leap with mathematical accuracy at the corresponding point; and this habit is THE little streamlet whose tiny usually held up to ridicule as proving ranges and stickles form the middle the utter stupidity of the whole race. thread of this green combe in the DorIt really proves nothing but the good-set downs is just at present richly clad ness of their ancestral instincts. For with varied foliage. Tall spikes of the mountain animals, accustomed to follow yellow flag rise above the slow-flowing a leader, that leader being the bravest pools, while purple loose-strife overand strongest ram of the flock, must necessarily follow him with the most implicit obedience. He alone can see what obstacles come in the way; and each of the succeeding train must watch and imitate the actions of their predecessors. Otherwise, if the flock happens to come to a chasm, running as they often must with some speed, any individual which stopped to look and decide for itself before leaping would inevitably be pushed over the edge by those behind it, and so would lose all chance of handing down its cautious and sceptical spirit to any possible descendants. On the other hand, those uninquiring and blindly obedient animals which simply did as they saw others do would both survive themselves and become the parents of future and similar generations. Thus there would be handed down from dam to lamb a general tendency to sequaciousness-a This problem of the shape of leaves follow - my - leader spirit, which was certainly seems to me a most important really the best safeguard for the race one; and yet it has hardly been even against the evils of insubordination, still recognized by our scientific pastors and so fatal to Alpine climbers. And now masters. At best, Mr. Herbert Spenthat our sheep have settled down to a cer devotes to it a passing short chaptame and monotonous existence on the ter, or Mr. Darwin a stray sentence. downs of Sussex or the levels of the The practice of classifying plants mainMidlands, the old instinct clings to ly by means of their flowers has given them still, and speaks out plainly for the flower a wholly factitious and overtheir mountain origin. There are few wrought importance. Besides, flowers things in nature more interesting to are so pretty, and we cultivate them so notice than these constant survivals of largely, with little regard to the leaves, hangs the bank, and bunches of the convo water by means of their inclosed chlorophyl, exactly as if they were leaves. Now, as this is what a leaf has to do, its form will almost entirely depend upon the way it is affected by sunlight and the elements around it-except, indeed, in so far as it may be called upon to perform other functions, such as those of defence or defiance. This crowfoot is a good example of the results produced by such agents. Its lower leaves, which grow under water, are minutely subdivided into little branching lance like segments; while its upper ones, which raise their heads above the surface, are broad and united, like the common crowfoot type. How am I to account for these peculiarities? I fancy somehow thus that they have come to usurp almost sunlight, and building them up into the entire interest of botanists and hor- appropriate compounds in its own body. ticulturists alike. Darwinism itself has Certain little green worms or only heightened this exclusive interest luta have the same habit, and live for by calling attention to the reciprocal re- the most part cheaply off sunlight, lations which exist between the honey-making starch out of carbonic acid and bearing blossom and the fertilizing insect, the bright-colored petals and the myriad facets of the butterfly's eye. Yet the leaf is after all the real plant, and the flower is but a sort of afterthought, an embryo colony set apart for the propagation of like plants in future. Each leaf is in truth a separate individual organism, united with many others into a compound community, but possessing in full its own mouths and digestive organs, and carrying on its own life to a great extent independently of the rest. It may die without detriment to them; it may be lopped off with a few others as a cutting, and it continues its life-cycle quite unconcerned. An oak tree in full foliage is a magnificent group of such separate individuals whole nation in miniature: Plants which live habitually under it may be compared to a branched coral water almost always have thin, long, polypedom covered with a thousand lit-pointed leaves, often thread-like or tle insect workers, while each leaf an- mere waving filaments. The reason for swers rather to the separate polypes this is plain enough. Gases are not themselves. The leaves are even capa- very abundant in water, as it only holds ble of producing new individuals by in solution a limited quantity of oxygen what they contribute to the buds on and carbonic acid. Both of these the every branch; and the seeds which the plant needs, though in varying quantitree as a whole produces are to be ties the carbon to build up its starch, looked upon rather as the founders of and the oxygen to use up in its growth. fresh colonies, like the swarms of bees, Accordingly, broad and large leaves than as fresh individuals alone. Every would starve under water: there is not plant community, in short, both adds material enough diffused through it for new members to its own commonwealth, them to make a living from. But and sends off totally distinct germs to small, long, waving leaves which can form new commonwealths elsewhere. move up and down in the stream would Thus the leaf is, in truth, the central manage to catch almost every passing reality of the whole plant, while the particle of gaseous matter, and to utilflower exists only for the sake of send-ize it under the influence of sunlight.. ing out a shipload of young emigrants every now and then to try their fortunes in some unknown soil. Hence all plants which live in fresh water, and especially all plants of higher rank, have necessarily acquired such The whole life-business of a leaf is, a type of leaf. It is the only form in of course, to eat and grow, just as these which growth can possibly take place same functions form the whole life-busi- under their circumstances. Of course, ness of a caterpillar or a tadpole. But however, the particular pattern of leaf the way a plant eats, we all know, is depends largely upon the ancestral by taking carbon and hydrogen from form. Thus this crowfoot, even in its air and water under the influence of submerged leaves, preserves the general So, arrangement of ribs and leaflets com- the air, or loll at ease upon the surface mon to the whole buttercup tribe. For of the stream. Thus the crowfoot, too, the crowfoot family is a large and emi- cannot blossom to any purpose below nently adaptable race. Some of them the water; and as such among its anare larkspurs and similar queerly-shaped cestors as at first tried to do so must of blossoms; others are columbines which course have failed in producing any hang their complicated bells on dry and seed, they and their kind have died out rocky hillsides; but the larger part are forever; while only those lucky indibuttercups or marsh marigolds which viduals whose chance lot it was to grow have simple cup-shaped flowers, and a little taller and weedier than the rest, mostly frequent low and marshy ground. and so overtop the stream, have handOne of these typical crowfoots under ed down their race to our own time. stress of circumstances-inundation, or But as soon as the crowfoot finds itthe like—took once upon a time to liv-self above the level of the river, all the ing pretty permanently in the water. causes which made its leaf like those As its native meadows grew deeper and of other aquatic plants have ceased to deeper in flood it managed from year operate. The new leaves which sprout to year to assume a more nautical life. in the air meet with abundance of carSo, while its leaf necessarily remained bon and sunlight on every side; and in general structure a true crowfoot we know that plants grow fast just in leaf, it was naturally compelled to split proportion to the supply of carbon. itself up into thinner and narrower seg- They have pushed their way into an ments, each of which grew out in the unoccupied field, and they may thrive direction where it could find most stray apace without let or hindrance carbon atoms, and most sunlight, with- instead of splitting up into little lanceout interference from its neighbors. like leaflets, they loll on the surface, This, I take it, was the origin of the and spread out broader and fuller, like much-divided lower leaves. the rest of their race. The leaf beBut a crowfoot could never live per- comes at once a broad type of crowfoot manently under water. Seaweeds and leaf. Even the ends of the submerged their like, which propagate by a kind leaves, when any fall of the water in of spores, may remain below the sur-time of drought raises them above the face forever; but flowering plants for level, have a tendency (as I have often the most part must come up to the noticed) to grow broader and fatter, open air to blossom. The sea-weeds with increased facilities for food; but are in the same position as fish, original- when the whole leaf rises from the first ly developed in the water and wholly to the top the inherited family instinct adapted to it, whereas flowering plants are rather analogous to seals and whales, air-breathing creatures, whose ancestors lived on land, and who can themselves manage an aquatic existence only by frequent visits to the surface. So some flowering water-plants actually detach their male blossoms altogether, and let them float loose on the top of the water; while they send up their female flowers by means of a spiral coil, and draw them down again as soon as the wind or the fertilizing insects have carried the pollen to its proper receptacle, so as to ripen their seeds at leisure beneath the pond. Similarly, you may see the arrowhead and the water-lilies sending up their buds to open freely in finds full play for its genius, and the blades fill out as naturally as well-bred pigs. The two types of leaf remind one much of gills and lungs respectively. But above water, as below it, the crowfoot remains in principle a crowfoot still. The traditions of its race, acquired in damp marshy meadows, not actually under water, cling to it yet in spite of every change. Born river and pond plants which rise to the surface, like the water-lily or the duckweed, have broad floating leaves that contrast strongly with the waving filaments of wholly submerged species. They can find plenty of food everywhere, and as the sunlight falls flat upon them, they may as well spread out |