Proserpina, Volume 1

12. Not clipped, nor pruned, I think, after all,—nor dwarfed in the gardener's sense; but pausing in perpetual youth and strength, ordained out of their lips of roseate infancy. Rose-trees—the botanists have falsely called the proudest of them; yet not trees in any wise, they, nor doomed to know the edge of axe at their roots, nor the hoary waste of time, or searing thunderstroke, on sapless branches. Continual morning for them, and in them; they themselves an Aurora, purple and cloudless, stayed on all the happy hills. That shall be our name for them, in the flushed Phœnician colour of their height, in calm or tempest of the heavenly sea; how much holier than the depth of the Tyrian! And the queen of them on our own Alps shall be 'Aurora Alpium.'59

13. There is one word in the Miltonian painting of them which I must lean on specially; for the accurate English of it hides deep morality no less than botany. 'With hair implicit.' The interweaving of complex band, which knits the masses of heath or of Alpine rose into their dense tufts and spheres of flower, is to be noted both in these, and in stem structure of a higher order like that of the stone pine, for an expression of the instinct of the plant gathering itself into protective unity, whether against cold or heat, while the forms of the trees which have no hardship to sustain are uniformly based on the effort of each spray to separate itself from its fellows to the utmost, and obtain around its own leaves the utmost space of air.

In vulgar modern English, the term 'implicit' used of Trust or Faith, has come to signify only its serenity. But the Miltonian word gives the reason of serenity: the root and branch intricacy of closest knowledge and fellowship.

14. I have said that Milton has told us more in these few lines than any botanist could. I will prove my saying by placing in comparison with them two passages of description by the most imaginative and generally well-trained scientific man since Linnæus—Humboldt—which, containing much that is at this moment of special use to us, are curious also in the confusion even of the two orders of annual and perennial plants, and show, therefore, the extreme need of most careful initial work in this distinction of the reign of Cora from that of Kronos.

"The disk of the setting sun appeared like a globe of fire suspended over the savannah; and its last rays, as they swept the earth, illumined the extremities of the grass, strongly agitated by the evening breeze. In the low and humid places of the equinoxial zone, even when the gramineous plants and reeds present the aspect of a meadow, of turf, a rich decoration of the picture is usually wanting. I mean that variety of wild flowers which, scarcely rising above the grass, seem to lie upon a smooth bed of verdure. Between the tropics, the strength and luxury of vegetation give such a development to plants, that the smallest of the dicotyledonous family become shrubs.60 It would seem as if the liliaceous plants, mingled with the gramina, assumed the place of the flowers of our meadows. Their form is indeed striking; they dazzle by the variety and splendor of their colours; but, too high above the soil, they disturb that harmonious relation which exists among the plants that compose our meadows and our turf. Nature, in her beneficence, has given the landscape under every zone its peculiar type of beauty.

"After proceeding four hours across the savannahs, we entered into a little wood composed of shrubs and small trees, which is called El Pejual; no doubt because of the great abundance of the 'Pejoa' (Gaultheria odorata,) a plant with very odoriferous leaves. The steepness of the mountain became less considerable, and we felt an indescribable pleasure in examining the plants of this region. Nowhere, perhaps, can be found collected together in so small a space of ground, productions so beautiful, and so remarkable in regard to the geography of plants. At the height of a thousand toises, the lofty savannahs of the hills terminate in a zone of shrubs, which by their appearance, their tortuous branches, their stiff leaves, and the dimensions and beauty of their purple flowers, remind us of what is called in the Cordilleras of the Andes the vegetation of the paramos61 and the punas. We find there the family of the Alpine rhododendrons, the thibaudias, the andromedas, the vacciniums, and those befarias62 with resinous leaves, which we have several times compared to the rhododendron of our European Alps.

"Even when nature does not produce the same species in analogous climates, either in the plains of isothermal parallels, or on table-lands the temperature of which resembles that of places nearer the poles, we still remark a striking resemblance of appearance and physiognomy in the vegetation of the most distant countries. This phenomenon is one of the most curious in the history of organic forms. I say the history; for in vain would reason forbid man to form hypotheses on the origin of things: he is not the less tormented with these insoluble problems of the distribution of beings."

15. Insoluble—yes, assuredly, poor little beaten phantasms of palpitating clay that we are—and who asked us to solve it? Even this Humboldt, quiet-hearted and modest watcher of the ways of Heaven, in the real make of him, came at last to be so far puffed up by his vain science in declining years that he must needs write a Kosmos of things in the Universe, forsooth, as if he knew all about them! when he was not able meanwhile, (and does not seem even to have desired the ability,) to put the slightest Kosmos into his own 'Personal Narrative'; but leaves one to gather what one wants out of its wild growth; or rather, to wash or winnow what may be useful out of its débris, without any vestige either of reference or index; and I must look for these fragmentary sketches of heath and grass through chapter after chapter about the races of the Indian and religion of the Spaniard,—these also of great intrinsic value, but made useless to the general reader by interspersed experiment on the drifts of the wind and the depths of the sea.

16. But one more fragment out of a note (vol. iii., p. 494) I must give, with reference to an order of the Rhododendrons as yet wholly unknown to me.

"The name of vine tree, 'uvas camaronas' (Shrimp grapes?) is given in the Andes to plants of the genus Thibaudia on account of their large succulent fruit. Thus the ancient botanists give the name of Bear's vine, 'Uva Ursi,' and vine of Mount Ida, 'Vitis Idea,' to an Arbutus and Myrtillus which belong, like the Thibaudiæ, to the family of the Ericineæ."

Now, though I have one entire bookcase and half of another, and a large cabinet besides, or about fifteen feet square of books on botany beside me here, and a quantity more at Oxford, I have no means whatever, in all the heap, of finding out what a Thibaudia is like. Loudon's Cyclopædia, the only general book I have, tells me only that it will grow well in camellia houses, that its flowers develope at Christmas, and that they are beautifully varied like a fritillary: whereupon I am very anxious to see them, and taste their fruit, and be able to tell my pupils something intelligible of them,—a new order, as it seems to me, among my Oreiades. But for the present I can make no room for them, and must be content, for England and the Alps, with my single class, Myrtilla, including all the fruit-bearing and (more or less) myrtle-leaved kinds; and Azalea for the fruitless flushing of the loftier tribes; taking the special name 'Aurora' for the red and purple ones of Europe, and resigning the already accepted 'Rhodora' to those of the Andes and Himalaya.

17. Of which also, with help of earnest Indian botanists, I hope nevertheless to add some little history to that of our own Oreiades; but shall set myself on the most familiar of them first, as I partly hinted in taking for the frontispiece of this volume two unchecked shoots of our commonest heath, in their state of full lustre and decline. And now I must go out and see and think—and for the first time in my life—what becomes of all these fallen blossoms, and where my own mountain Cora hides herself in winter; and where her sweet body is laid in its death.

Think of it with me, for a moment before I go. That harvest of amethyst bells, over all Scottish and Irish and Cumberland hill and moorland; what substance is there in it, yearly gathered out of the mountain winds,—stayed there, as if the morning and evening clouds had been caught out of them and woven into flowers; 'Ropes of sea-sand'—but that is child's magic merely, compared to the weaving of the Heath out of the cloud. And once woven, how much of it is forever worn by the Earth? What weight of that transparent tissue, half crystal and half comb of honey, lies strewn every year dead under the snow?

I must go and look, and can write no more to-day; nor to-morrow neither. I must gather slowly what I see, and remember; and meantime leaving, to be dealt with afterwards, the difficult and quite separate question of the production of wood, I will close this first volume of Proserpina with some necessary statements respecting the operations, serviceable to other creatures than themselves, in which the lives of the noblest plants are ended: honourable in this service equally, though evanescent, some,—in the passing of a breeze—or the dying of a day;—and patient some, of storm and time, serene in fruitful sanctity, through all the uncounted ages which Man has polluted with his tears.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SEED AND HUSK

1. Not the least sorrowful, nor least absurd of the confusions brought on us by unscholarly botanists, blundering into foreign languages, when they do not know how to use their own, is that which has followed on their practice of calling the seed-vessels of flowers 'egg-vessels,'63 in Latin; thus involving total loss of the power of the good old English word 'husk,' and the good old French one, 'cosse.' For all the treasuries of plants (see Chapter IV., § 17) may be best conceived, and described, generally, as consisting of 'seed' and 'husk,'—for the most part two or more seeds, in a husk composed of two or more parts, as pease in their shell, pips in an orange, or kernels in a walnut; but whatever their number, or the method of their enclosure, let the student keep clear in his mind, for the base of all study of fructification, the broad distinction between the seed, as one thing, and the husk as another: the seed, essential to the continuance of the plant's race; and the husk, adapted, primarily, to its guard and dissemination; but secondarily, to quite other and far more important functions.

2. For on this distinction follows another practical one of great importance. A seed may serve, and many do mightily serve, for the food of man, when boiled, crushed, or otherwise industriously prepared by man himself, for his mere sustenance. But the husk of the seed is prepared in many cases for the delight of his eyes, and the pleasure of his palate, by Nature herself, and is then called a 'fruit.'

3. The varieties of structure both in seed and husk, and yet more, the manner in which the one is contained, and distributed by, the other, are infinite; and in some cases the husk is apparently wanting, or takes some unrecognizable form. But in far the plurality of instances the two parts of the plant's treasury are easily distinguishable, and must be separately studied, whatever their apparent closeness of relation, or, (as in all natural things,) the equivocation sometimes taking place between the one and the other. To me, the especially curious point in this matter is that, while I find the most elaborate accounts given by botanists of the stages of growth in each of these parts of the treasury, they never say of what use the guardian is to the guarded part, irrespective of its service to man. The mechanical action of the husk in containing and scattering the seeds, they indeed often notice and insist on; but they do not tell us of what, if any, nutritious or fostering use the rind is to a chestnut, or an orange's pulp to its pips, or a peach's juice to its stone.

4. Putting aside this deeper question for the moment, let us make sure we understand well, and define safely, the separate parts themselves. A seed consists essentially of a store, or sack, containing substance to nourish a germ of life, which is surrounded by such substance, and in the process of growth is first fed by it. The germ of life itself rises into two portions, and not more than two, in the seeds of two-leaved plants; but this symmetrical dualism must not be allowed to confuse the student's conception, of the three organically separate parts,—the tough skin of a bean, for instance; the softer contents of it which we boil to eat; and the small germ from which the root springs when it is sown. A bean is the best type of the whole structure. An almond out of its shell, a peach-kernel, and an apple-pip are also clear and perfect, though varied types.

5. The husk, or seed-vessel, is seen in perfect simplicity of type in the pod of a bean, or the globe of a poppy. There are, I believe, flowers in which it is absent or imperfect; and when it contains only one seed, it may be so small and closely united with the seed it contains, that both will be naturally thought of as one thing only. Thus, in a dandelion, the little brown grains, which may be blown away, each with its silken parachute, are every one of them a complete husk and seed together. But the majority of instances (and those of plants the most serviceable to man) in which the seed-vessel has entirely a separate structure and mechanical power, justify us in giving it the normal term 'husk,' as the most widely applicable and intelligible.

6. The change of green, hard, and tasteless vegetable substance into beautifully coloured, soft, and delicious substance, which produces what we call a fruit, is, in most cases, of the husk only; in others, of the part of the stalk which immediately sustains the seed; and in a very few instances, not properly a change, but a distinct formation, of fruity substance between the husk and seed. Normally, however, the husk, like the seed, consists always of three parts; it has an outer skin, a central substance of peculiar nature, and an inner skin, which holds the seed. The main difficulty, in describing or thinking of the completely ripened product of any plant, is to discern clearly which is the inner skin of the husk, and which the outer skin of the seed. The peach is in this respect the best general type,—the woolly skin being the outer one of the husk; the part we eat, the central substance of the husk; and the hard shell of the stone, the inner skin of the husk. The bitter kernel within is the seed.

7. In this case, and in the plum and cherry, the two parts under present examination—husk and seed—separate naturally; the fruity part, which is the body of the husk, adhering firmly to the shell, which is its inner coat. But in the walnut and almond, the two outer parts of the husk separate from the interior one, which becomes an apparently independent 'shell.' So that when first I approached this subject I divided the general structure of a treasury into three parts—husk, shell, and kernel; and this division, when we once have mastered the main one, will be often useful. But at first let the student keep steadily to his conception of the two constant parts, husk and seed, reserving the idea of shells and kernels for one group of plants only.

8. It will not be always without difficulty that he maintains the distinction, when the tree pretends to have changed it. Thus, in the chestnut, the inner coat of the husk becomes brown, adheres to the seed, and seems part of it; and we naturally call only the thick, green, prickly coat, the husk. But this is only one of the deceiving tricks of Nature, to compel our attention more closely. The real place of separation, to her mind, is between the mahogany-coloured shell and the nut itself, and that more or less silky and flossy coating within the brown shell is the true lining of the entire 'husk.' The paler brown skin, following the rugosities of the nut, is the true sack or skin of the seed. Similarly in the walnut and almond.

9. But, in the apple, two new tricks are played us. First, in the brown skin of the ripe pip, we might imagine we saw the part correspondent to the mahogany skin of the chestnut, and therefore the inner coat of the husk. But it is not so. The brown skin of the pips belongs to them properly, and is all their own. It is the true skin or sack of the seed. The inner coat of the husk is the smooth, white, scaly part of the core that holds them.

Then,—for trick number two. We should as naturally imagine the skin of the apple, which we peel off, to be correspondent to the skin of the peach; and therefore, to be the outer part of the husk. But not at all. The outer part of the husk in the apple is melted away into the fruity mass of it, and the red skin outside is the skin of its stalk, not of its seed-vessel at all!

10. I say 'of its stalk,'—that is to say, of the part of the stalk immediately sustaining the seed, commonly called the torus, and expanding into the calyx. In the apple, this torus incorporates itself with the husk completely; then refines its own external skin, and colours that variously and beautifully, like the true skin of the husk in the peach, while the withered leaves of the calyx remain in the 'eye' of the apple.

But in the 'hip' of the rose, the incorporation with the husk of the seed does not take place. The torus, or,—as in this flower from its peculiar form it is called,—the tube of the calyx, alone forms the frutescent part of the hip; and the complete seeds, husk and all, (the firm triangular husk enclosing an almond-shaped kernel,) are grouped closely in its interior cavity, while the calyx remains on the top in a large and scarcely withering star. In the nut, the calyx remains green and beautiful, forming what we call the husk of a filbert; and again we find Nature amusing herself by trying to make us think that this strict envelope, almost closing over the single seed, is the same thing to the nut that its green shell is to a walnut!

11. With still more capricious masquing, she varies and hides the structure of her 'berries.'

The strawberry is a hip turned inside-out, the frutescent receptacle changed into a scarlet ball, or cone, of crystalline and delicious coral, in the outside of which the separate seeds, husk and all, are imbedded. In the raspberry and blackberry, the interior mound remains sapless; and the rubied translucency of dulcet substance is formed round each separate seed, upon its husk; not a part of the husk, but now an entirely independent and added portion of the plant's bodily form.

12. What is thus done for each seed, on the outside of the receptacle, in the raspberry, is done for each seed, inside the calyx, in a pomegranate; which is a hip in which the seeds have become surrounded with a radiant juice, richer than claret wine; while the seed itself, within the generous jewel, is succulent also, and spoken of by Tournefort as a "baie succulente." The tube of the calyx, brown-russet like a large hip, externally, is yet otherwise divided, and separated wholly from the cinque-foiled, and cinque-celled rose, both in number of petal and division of treasuries; the calyx has eight points, and nine cells.

13. Lastly, in the orange, the fount of fragrant juice is interposed between the seed and the husk. It is wholly independent of both; the Aurantine rind, with its white lining and divided compartments, is the true husk; the orange pips are the true seeds; and the eatable part of the fruit is formed between them, in clusters of delicate little flasks, as if a fairy's store of scented wine had been laid up by her in the hollow of a chestnut shell, between the nut and rind; and then the green changed to gold.

14. I have said 'lastly'—of the orange, for fear of the reader's weariness only; not as having yet represented, far less exhausted, the variety of frutescent form. But these are the most important types of it; and before I can explain the relation between these, and another, too often confounded with them—the granular form of the seed of grasses.—I must give some account of what, to man, is far more important than the form—the gift to him in fruit-food; and trial, in fruit-temptation.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE FRUIT GIFT

1. In the course of the preceding chapter, I hope that the reader has obtained, or may by a little patience both obtain and secure, the idea of a great natural Ordinance, which, in the protection given to the part of plants necessary to prolong their race, provides, for happier living creatures, food delightful to their taste, and forms either amusing or beautiful to their eyes. Whether in receptacle, calyx, or true husk,—in the cup of the acorn, the fringe of the filbert, the down of the apricot, or bloom of the plum, the powers of Nature consult quite other ends than the mere continuance of oaks and plum trees on the earth; and must be regarded always with gratitude more deep than wonder, when they are indeed seen with human eyes and human intellect.

2. But in one family of plants, the contents also of the seed, not the envelope of it merely, are prepared for the support of the higher animal life; and their grain, filled with the substance which, for universally understood name, may best keep the Latin one of Farina,—becoming in French, 'Farine,' and in English, 'Flour,'—both in the perfectly nourishing elements of it, and its easy and abundant multiplicability, becomes the primal treasure of human economy.

3. It has been the practice of botanists of all nations to consider the seeds of the grasses together with those of roses and pease, as if all could be described on the same principles, and with the same nomenclature of parts. But the grain of corn is a quite distinct thing from the seed of pease. In it, the husk and the seed envelope have become inextricably one. All the exocarps, endocarps, epicarps, mesocarps, shells, husks, sacks, and skins, are woven at once together into the brown bran; and inside of that, a new substance is collected for us, which is not what we boil in pease, or poach in eggs, or munch in nuts, or grind in coffee;—but a thing which, mixed with water and then baked, has given to all the nations of the world their prime word for food, in thought and prayer,—Bread; their prime conception of the man's and woman's labor in preparing it—("whoso putteth hand to the plough"—two women shall be grinding at the mill)—their prime notion of the means of cooking by fire—("which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven"), and their prime notion of culinary office—the "chief baker," cook, or pastrycook,—(compare Bedreddin Hassan in the Arabian Nights): and, finally, to modern civilization, the Saxon word 'lady,' with whatever it imports.

4. It has also been the practice of botanists to confuse all the ripened products of plants under the general term 'fruit.' But the essential and separate fruit-gift is of two substances, quite distinct from flour, namely, oil and wine, under the last term including for the moment all kinds of juice which will produce alcohol by fermentation. Of these, oil may be produced either in the kernels of nuts, as in almonds, or in the substance of berries, as in the olive, date, and coffee-berry. But the sweet juice which will become medicinal in wine, can only be developed in the husk, or in the receptacle.

5. The office of the Chief Butler, as opposed to that of the Chief Baker, and the office of the Good Samaritan, pouring in oil and wine, refer both to the total fruit-gift in both kinds: but in the study of plants, we must primarily separate our notion of their gifts to men into the three elements, flour, oil, and wine; and have instantly and always intelligible names for them in Latin, French, and English.

And I think it best not to confuse our ideas of pure vegetable substance with the possible process of fermentation:—so that rather than 'wine,' for a constant specific term, I will take 'Nectar,'—this term more rightly including the juices of the peach, nectarine, and plum, as well as those of the grape, currant, and apple.

Our three separate substances will then be easily named in all three languages: