Eye Spy Part 10

The still younger maiden with her dandelion ball, whose feathered parachutes must be dislodged upon the breeze with three puffs from her little puckered mouth, with all sorts of fate depending upon the odd or even number of the remnant seeds, is as universal as the dandelion itself, while the more homely symbols of wish-bone, horseshoe, or horsechestnut, as we all know, are proverbially potent as personal or household charms against ill luck. I once knew a shrewd countryman who gave all the credit of his success in "tradin'" to the "hoss-chestnut"

which he carried in his pocket, and would as soon think of throwing his money away as to "drive a trade" without it. More than one old "down-East" dame "sets gre't store" by the horseshoe hung above her doorway, always secured ends up, "so's the luck can't run out." Then there was old Aunt Huldy, who, while she claimed to locate springs and wells the country round by her witch-hazel divining-rod, never ventured upon these expeditions without the concealed necklace of dried star puff-b.a.l.l.s hung about her neck.

But perhaps the most universal of all these natural symbols of good-fortune is to be found in the four-leaved clover, almost a world-wide superst.i.tion, and traced back to the ancient astrologers.

"If a man, walking the fields," writes one of them, "finds any four-leaved gra.s.se, he shall in a short while after finde some good thing."

The clover was considered as being especially "noisome to witches,"

and the "holy trefoil charm" was a powerful spell against their harm; the "trefoil" being the most widely used t.i.tle of the clover--_Trifolium_, as it is in the botany--three leaved. And such it _should_ be, to be true to its christening. But it frequently takes exception to the botany and gives us an extra leaf, and thus we have our "four-leaved clover," a rarity which many of us, seek as we will, have never yet been able to discover in its native haunt, even though a whole handful of them are plucked here and there before our eyes by our more favored companions. Indeed, there are some lucky folk who seem literally to stumble upon "four-leaved gra.s.se" wherever they go--who, having found one leaf, will sit down quietly in the gra.s.s and ere long acc.u.mulate a bouquet.

Yes, here's the secret: It is not your eager gadding quest that gets your four-leaved clover. Nor is it all a matter of "sharp eyes." There is a "knack" about finding four-leaved clover, and this very knack of the so-called "lucky ones," implying as it does the operation of quest, observation, and common-sense, would logically argue a corresponding fulfilment of success in the affairs of daily life. For the observant clover-hunter, if his mind and eye work together, soon learns that the "four-leaved" variety is fond of company, and that the whim of the plant which thus produces one such leaf is very apt to be humored in several others. Thus, having discerned _one_ four-leaved clover, we a.s.sume a _tendency_ in the parent plant, which further search often discloses, sometimes to our great surprise, and, if we are as superst.i.tious as our antique philosopher above quoted, to our unbounded satisfaction. If, for instance, this one extra leaflet brings such a.s.surance of "good things" to come, what shall be said of a leaf with five or six leaflets--yes, seven, or perhaps eight--I might even add nine--a veritable little green rose of clover leaves, all on one stem, a stem which is sometimes plainly composite, of two or three adherent stems? All of these exuberant forms are to be found with diligent search, and often in the same close vicinity. Nor are these all the varied freaks which the plant will disclose for the seeking. Perhaps you may chance upon that four-leaved variety in which the extra leaflet stands upright in the midst of the three, and is transformed into a tapering cup. These elfin goblets are not exceedingly rare. Occasionally we may chance to find two of these supported by one or two perfect leaflets at the base. Or, if we are especially fortunate, our "good health" may be offered in three of the tiny beakers, not mere _apparent_ cups, but with the edges of the goblets completely united, and which might be filled to the brim with dew.

A collection of the natural whims of the clover, both red and white, would make an interesting leaflet in our herbarium. In the hands of the floriculturist who should cultivate these eccentricities most remarkable varieties of clover might ensue. Fancy a clover plant with every leaf a cl.u.s.ter of tiny cups, or of leaves so doubled as to appear like green roses! Here is a chance for our boys and girls to experiment, and without much real labor, too. Both the red and white clovers are perennial--that is, they come up year after year from the same root. A plant which this year favors the "four-leaf" will doubtless follow the same example next year, and the seed from its flowers might also inherit and transmit the same peculiarity, possibly in an exaggerated degree; and careful selection from year to year, keeping the plants in a corner by themselves, might lead to some interesting results, especially if the tendency were further stimulated by enrichment of soil, to which the clover responds vigorously.

My experience with "clover luck" has been considerable. I believe I have found almost every possible eccentric combination of which the plant is naturally capable, a few of which I have here pictured.

My best success has been met in the "rowen" fields, or the growth after mowing, the energy of the plant, thus pruned as it were in its prime, finding immediate expression in an exuberance of luxuriant foliage, which, I think, inclines to a multiplication of leaves. I once sat down beside such a clump upon which I had discovered a single "four-leaf," and by dint of plucking and examining every leaf in the cl.u.s.ter, succeeded in obtaining thirty-nine specimens. "Why not make it forty while you are about it?" a friend of mine recently remarked, with evident incredulity. Well, I _tried_ to, but after grubbing up the last embryo leaf at the ground, thirty-nine was my limit--all from one plant. The collection might be subdivided as follows: Four leaves, 22; five leaves, 7; six leaves, 3; seven leaves, 1; nine leaves, 1; cups and leaves, various, 5.

At another time I spied a single five-leaved in a dense bed of rowen clover at the road-side, and seating myself close beside it, calculating on this habit of the plant, I vowed I would not get up until I had collected forty multiple leaves. I soon obtained more than this number.

The clover-leaf quest is a good eye-sharpener. Which of our boys can show us the best record?

I wonder if any of my young readers have ever seen how the clover says its prayers and goes to sleep, with its two side leaflets folded together like reverent palms, and the terminal leaflet bowed above them? So the normal leaf spends the night in the dews. I often wonder what arrangement of adjustment is arrived at when so many leaflets conspire to confuse.

My clover-hunting has been confined to the red and white clovers, both species having common tendencies. In the red, the leaves being larger, the freaks are more conspicuous, but the cup forms seem more commonly identified with the white clover.

Barberry Manners

One who is unfamiliar with the remarkable doings of blossoms in a.s.sociation with their insect honey-sippers might consider it somewhat surprising to attribute "manners" to a flower. But who that has seen the sage-blossom clap its bee visitor on the back as she ushers him in at the threshold of her purple door, marking him for her own with her dab of yellow pollen as she almost pushes him into the nectar feast within; who that has witnessed the almost roguish demonstration which the tiny andromeda-bell extends to the sipping bee at its doorway--who that has seen these can any longer doubt that blossoms have "manners"

as well as we bigger, more conscious beings? Yes, manners, unquestionably--"bad manners," it would almost seem, in some instances, as, for example, in this andromeda blossom-bell, which, in its perfume and its nectar, deliberately invites the tiny _Andrena_ bee, only to deluge its little, black, hairy face with a smothering shower of dusty pollen. A remarkable style of etiquette, surely, that is, from our _human_ standpoint. But in the realm of Flora the standards of decorum, so far as greeting is concerned, are not governed by artificial whim. There is no "smart set" to dictate and set the fashion for others less smart to follow. Each individual flower is a law unto itself as to the method of its greeting to its especial insect friend. The blossom etiquette of welcome is literally as "old as the hills," and has come down with little change from an ancestry which dates back perhaps to a period when there were no human "ancestors" on the globe. So these "manners" are natural and original, to say the least, even if they are so queer sometimes. What would you think of a friend whose hospitable smile and welcome at his doorway should invite you thither only that your foot might touch a trigger and let fall the floor beneath you, while at the same time you are half suffocated with an explosion of a bushel of yellow corn meal? Yet such is something like the spectacular reception which the lotus clover, the desmodium, and the genista flowers consider the most expressive form of welcome. But the little bees seem to enjoy it, and go again and again to each successive flower, well knowing what the result will be, and apparently "touching off the trigger" without a tremor, or even holding their breath. But they and their foreparents for thousands of years have got accustomed to it, and I half imagine that the baby bee, even in his first visit to one of these blossoms, knows precisely what will happen. Pop! pop! go the exploding flowers, one after the other, at each touch of the bee, throwing up a cloud of yellow pollen which covers the bodies of the insects until they are as dusty as little millers.

There is an endless variety in these various welcomes among the flowers, and our barberry has one of the queerest of them all. Poets of all ages have loved to dwell upon the flowers--their "swete smels,"

exquisite forms, fragrance, and colors. The droning bees in an environment of fragrant bloom have moved many a poetic pen to inspiration. But it is not often that the bards have seen deep enough into the floral mysteries to immortalize the _doings_ of the blossoms.

I recall one such allusion, however, with reference to this mischievous blossom of the barberry. How well old Hosea Biglow knew its pranks!

"All down the loose-walled lanes in archin' bowers The barb'ry droops its strings o' golden flowers, Whose shrinkin' hearts the school-gals love to try With _pins_. They'll worry yourn so, boys, bime-by."

Those "shrinkin' hearts" of the barberry blossom, so long the wonder and amus.e.m.e.nt of children, including many children of adult growth, have, so far as I know, herein found their first and only historian--historian, but not interpreter. For Hosea Biglow, nor his literary parent, James Russell Lowell, never dreamed of the significance of this strange spectacle in the shrinkin' hearts of the barberry bloom when surprised with the point of a pin.

But the bee can tell us all about it. He has known this singular trick in the barberry for ages, and kept the secret all to himself. Only comparatively recently (1859 or thereabouts) did the secret leak out, when Darwin, by the previous hints of several other philosophers, discovered the key which unlocked the mystery of this as well as thousands of other similar riddles among the flowers.

These strange "manners" of the blossoms had then a deep vital principle at their base. They had not _always_ been thus, but had gradually, through long ages of time, changed and modified their shapes, colors, odors, nectar, and their manners for one purpose--_to insure_ their pollen being conveyed away upon the bodies of insects and carried to a _second_ flower, and there placed upon the stigma to insure fertilization and development of the seed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "In archin' bowers"]

The plans, devices, tricks, and pranks by which flowers accomplish this result are past belief. I have indicated only a few by way of a hint, and in previous papers on the bluebottle and figwort have described others, but none quite similar to the barberry.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 1]

We all know the barberry, the p.r.i.c.kly, th.o.r.n.y barberry, whether with its "strings o' golden flowers" or its drooping cl.u.s.ters of brilliant scarlet acid berries. But each one of those berries is but a token of a bee's visit, as we shall presently see. At Fig. 1 I have shown a plan of the barberry blossom seen from below, its yellow sepals and petals open, and opposite each of the inner set, and pressed against it, a stamen. This stamen is shown below in three stages--closed, partly open, and fully open--the queer little ear-shaped lids finally drawn up, showing the pollen-pockets, and also withdrawing a portion of the pollen from the cavity. At the centre is seen the circular tip of the ovary which finally becomes the berry--that is, when the little scheme here planned has been fulfilled. This circular form represents the tip of the ovary, and the little toothed rim the _stigma_. Now what is the intention here expressed? This construction represents a plan, first, to invite a bee--this is done by its color, its fragrance, and its nectar, which is secreted in a gland at the base of each petal, near the centre of the flower; secondly, to make that bee bear away the pollen; thirdly, to cause that same bee to place this pollen on the stigma rim of the next flower he visits. In Fig. 2 we see how beautifully this plan is carried out by the insect, without his suspecting how perfectly he has been utilized. At A we see the same flower cut open sideways, the waiting, expectant stamens tucked away at the sides, leaving a free opening to the base of the flower.

Now comes our bee. He must needs hang back downward to sip at the drooping flower. As his tongue enters, and finally touches the base of these stamens, _clap_! they come one after another against his tongue and face, and there deposit their load of pollen (B). The bee, who has doubtless got over his surprise at this demonstration--if, indeed, he ever had any--now flies to another blossom, perhaps on the same cl.u.s.ter (C). Entering it as before, the notched edge of the stigmatic rim comes in contact with the pollen on his tongue and face, and the flower is thus fertilized by pollen from another barberry blossom, the intention of the flower now perfectly realized in _cross_-fertilization.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 2]

The seeds from _cross_-fertilized flowers are almost invariably more vigorous, and thus yield more vigorous plants, than those of flowers fertilized with their own _pollen_, and this is why most flowers have necessarily developed some means by which cross-fertilization can be secured. And this has been done through evolution working on the lines of _natural_ selection, those seedlings which had originally happened, by a variation in the flower, to be thus favored by some chance peculiarity which insured cross-fertilization, winning in the struggle with the previous weaker individuals, and finally supplanting them altogether.

A Woolly Flock

Hardly a season pa.s.ses without my being in receipt of one or more inquiries, personal or by letter, concerning this snowy brood which haunts the alders in the swamp or along the road-side, and which envelops the smaller branches in its dense, feathery fringe. It is often one of the most frequent and conspicuous incidents in a country walk during its season, and its season ranges from its height in early summer until the frost. And yet how few there are, even of those, perhaps, who pa.s.s it every day, who have any definite idea of its character!

I know one rustic who claimed that it was "dry-rot," or a "speeshy of mould"; but the woolly phenomenon is commonly dismissed by the rural mind with the observation that it is "bugs of some sort." In this case the haphazard verdict happens to be the literal truth, though the speaker little suspects how closely he has discriminated. But his present skill is easily accounted for when we remember that only yesterday he had a great deal to say about "June-bugs" and "lightning-bugs." He will tell you all about "lady-bugs," too, and "rose-bugs," and "horn-bugs," and "pinch-bugs"--and has he not often given his strong opinion on "potato-bugs"?--not one of which insects is in the least ent.i.tled to the name of "bug." Only this very morning he asked me if I was "as fond of goin' buggin' as I used to be." But to the granger laity the entomologist is always a "bug-hunter," even though no single species of a bug is to be found in his entire insect cabinet.

What, then, is a bug, and why is the discrimination of "bugs of some sort" so truly applicable to this brood with the snowy wool which grows upon the alder twigs?

The term "bug" has almost become a popular synonym for "insect." All bugs _are_ insects, 'tis true, but it by no means follows that all insects are bugs. The "squash-bug" is almost the only insect that is known by its true t.i.tle in the popular vocabulary, for this disgusting insect is in truth a typical bug.

But who would ever think of calling the whizzing harvest-fly a "bug?"

Rather will they persist that he is a "locust," which he is not. He should be called the cicada. The "gra.s.shopper" of the fields is the true locust, whose swarms of certain species in the Orient have so often shut out the sun, and whose voracious feeding has laid waste whole square miles of vegetation in a single night.

But such a swarm of locusts as we read of in Scripture, and frequently in the history of modern times and in our own country, would be comparatively tame and merely amusing affairs were they composed of our so-called "locust"--he of the whizzing timbrel in the sultry August noon. For this insect has no teeth, and could not bite a blade of gra.s.s if it wanted to. And herein we see one of the peculiarities which const.i.tute him a "bug," and which also includes in the same company our woolly swarm upon the alder twigs. In place of teeth these insects are supplied with a beak for sucking the juices of plants. If we carefully examine the dense snowy ma.s.s we find it composed of small tufts closely crowded together, each tuft being borne upon the plump body of a small insect whose beak is deeply sunk into the tender bark.

I have separated one of the little creatures, and furnished his portrait as he appears when viewed through a magnifying-gla.s.s, only the lower portion of his body being covered with the wool, his head and legs being usually concealed beneath the pluming growth of his neighbors. This feathery growth seems of the most delicate consistency--in truth, more suggestive of white "mould" than any other natural substance, and seems to proceed from pores in the plump body beneath it. The slightest breath wafts the cobwebby tips of the fringe, and the least rude touch easily dislodges it, exposing the round, naked body of what is now clearly seen to be an aphis, or plant-louse, which nature, for some reason, has seen fit to clothe with swan's-down.

In early June the white down first appears on the alders in tiny patches here and there. This gradually extends down the stem, at length, perhaps, completely encircling it, and thus remaining for weeks, the full-grown aphis at last attaining a length of about three-sixteenths of an inch.

A similar brood is sometimes seen in profusion on beech-trees and also on the apple-tree. But if we imagine that because these insects are without teeth they are therefore harmless, we are greatly mistaken.

What they lack in individual effect they fully compensate for in numbers, and the combined attack of a girdle of thousands of these sucking beaks, for weeks absorbing the sap, may often result in the death of the branch beyond them.

Dr. Harris, in his admirable work on "Insects Injurious to Vegetation," tells us that "in Gloucestershire, England, so many apple-trees were destroyed by these lice in the year 1810 that the making of cider had to be abandoned. So infested were many of the trees that they seemed, at a short distance, as if they had been white-washed."

Other insects, such as the flea and the mosquito, are also possessed of similar "beaks for sucking," but neither of these examples is a bug, both being _flies_--the flea merely a wingless fly with wonderfully developed legs. Our entomology tells us that a bug is a member of the _Hemiptera_, meaning "half-winged;" the wings of the typical bug, like the squash-bug, being transparent for only about half their length. But as in the flea among flies, here we find myriads of true bugs without a vestige of wings, and others, like the cicada, with ample wings as clear and free from opacity as those of a fly. It would take more s.p.a.ce than I have at disposal to tell precisely what a bug really is entomologically, such a diversity of forms is presented in the family. But the sucking beak, and the fact that the average bug is _born_ a bug from the egg, instead of going through the usual transformation of larva, chrysalis, and imago, will have to suffice us for the present. Here, for instance, is the great sub-tribe of the aphis, to which our woolly specimen belongs. What is their life history? The eggs of the mother aphis are laid in the autumn, giving birth to the baby swarm in the following spring. In an almost incredible time they have multiplied to such an extent that the twigs of our roses and many other plants are lost to view in the encircling swarm. The secret of this wonderful arithmetical progression may be seen in the following quotation, which applies to aphides in general:

"The plant-louse of the apple-tree produces one hundred young ones in a single generation, these being born alive, and each of these brings forth others in equal number, until, at the end of the tenth generation, which is reached before the coming of frost, the original aphis has become the mother of one quintillion of her species."

But up to this time nearly all the aphides have been females; in the last generation the winged males appear, and are seen a.s.sembled among the swarm--the last mother brood laying the eggs which are to start anew the cycle of life the following season.

So far as I have observed, however, the woolly species of aphis never acquires wings, nature having in a measure compensated for their absence in the growth of plumy down, which, according to Harris, is so buoyant as to enable the insect to be borne upon the breeze from tree to tree. To this resource he attributes the spread of the wingless apple-lice species. But it would take a stiff breeze thus to waft the body of our plump dweller on the alder, unless, indeed, in his younger days.

"What Ails Him"