Volume II Part 4 (2/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. III.]

5. Pinguicula Minima: Least b.u.t.terwort; in D. 1021 called Villosa, the _scape_ of it being hairy. I have not yet got rid of this absurd word 'scape,' meaning, in botanist's Latin, the flower-stalk of a flower growing out of a cl.u.s.ter of leaves on the ground. It is a bad corruption of 'sceptre,' and especially false and absurd, because a true sceptre is necessarily branched.[15] In 'Proserpina,' when it is spoken of distinctively, it is called 'virgula' (see vol. i., pp. 146, 147, 151, 152). The hairs on the virgula are in this instance so minute, that even with a lens I cannot see them in the Danish plate: of which Fig. 3 is a rough translation into woodcut, to show the grace and mien of the little thing. The trine leaf cl.u.s.ter is characteristic, and the folding up of the leaf edges. The flower, in the Danish plate, full purple. Abundant in east of _Finmark_ (Finland?), but _always growing in marsh moss_, (Sphagnum pal.u.s.tre).

6. I call it 'Minima' only, as the least of the five here named; without putting forward any claim for it to be the smallest pinguicula that ever was or will be. In such sense only, the epithets minima or maxima are to be understood when used in 'Proserpina': and so also, every statement and every principle is only to be understood as true or tenable, respecting the plants which the writer has seen, and which he is sure that the reader can easily see: liable to modification to any extent by wider experience; but better first learned securely within a narrow fence, and afterwards trained or fructified, along more complex trellises.

7. And indeed my readers--at least, my newly found readers--must note always that the only power which I claim for any of my books, is that of being right and true as far as they reach. None of them pretend to be Kosmoses;--none to be systems of Positivism or Negativism, on which the earth is in future to swing instead of on its old worn-out poles;--none of them to be works of genius;--none of them to be, more than all true work _must_ be, pious;--and none to be, beyond the power of common people's eyes,[16] ears, and noses, 'aesthetic.' They tell you that the world is _so_ big, and can't be made bigger--that you yourself are also so big, and can't be made bigger, however you puff or bloat yourself; but that, on modern mental nourishment, you may very easily be made smaller. They tell you that two and two are four, that ginger is hot in the mouth, that roses are red, and s.m.u.ts black. Not themselves a.s.suming to be pious, they yet a.s.sure you that there is such a thing as piety in the world, and that it is wiser than impiety; and not themselves pretending to be works of genius, they yet a.s.sure you that there is such a thing as genius in the world, and that it is meant for the light and delight of the world.

8. Into these repet.i.tions of remarks on my work, often made before, I have been led by an unlucky author who has just sent me his book, advising me that it is ”neither critical nor sentimental” (he had better have said in plain English ”without either judgment or feeling”), and in which nearly the first sentence I read is--”Solomon with all his acuteness was not wise enough to ... etc., etc., etc.” ('give the Jews the British const.i.tution,'

I believe the man means.) He is not a whit more conceited than Mr. Herbert Spencer, or Mr. Goldwin Smith, or Professor Tyndall,--or any lively London apprentice out on a Sunday; but this general superciliousness with respect to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his politics, characteristic of the modern c.o.c.kney, Yankee, and Anglicised Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for us of the old school, who were well whipped when we were young; and have been in the habit of occasionally ascertaining our own levels as we grew older, and of recognizing that, here and there, somebody stood higher, and struck harder.

9. A difficult thing to deal with, I feel more and more, hourly, even to the point of almost ceasing to write; not only every feeling I have, but, of late, even _every word I use_, being alike inconceivable to the insolence, and unintelligible amidst the slang, of the modern London writers. Only in the last magazine I took up, I found an article by Mr.

Goldwin Smith on the Jews (of which the gist--as far as it had any--was that we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of which I found the word 'tribal' repeated about ten times in every page. Now, if 'tribe' makes 'tribal,' tube must make tubal, cube, cubal, and gibe, gibal; and I suppose we shall next hear of tubal music, cubal minerals, and gibal conversation! And observe how all this bad English leads instantly to blunder in thought, prolonged indefinitely. The Jewish Tribes are not separate races, but the descendants of brothers. The Roman Tribes, political divisions; essentially Trine: and the whole force of the word Tribune vanishes, as soon as the ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy innovation by the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called 'tesseral'; the writer being much too fine to call them 'four-al,' and too much bent on distinguis.h.i.+ng himself from all previous writers to call them cubic.

10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible schoolmasters, are to do in this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, which rains fools upon them like frogs, I can no more with any hope or patience conceive;--but this finally I repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written in honest English, of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour of a little finer or Elizabethan quality: and that the things they tell you are comprehensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent person; and _accurate_, to a degree which the accepted methods of modern science cannot, in my own particular fields, approach.

11. Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for immediate instance, my extrication for him, from among the uvularias, of these five species of the b.u.t.terwort; which, being all that need be distinctly named and remembered, _do_ need to be first carefully distinguished, and then remembered in their companions.h.i.+p. So alike are they, that Gerarde makes no distinction among them; but ma.s.ses them under the general type of the frequent English one, described as the second kind of his promiscuous group of 'Sanicle,' ”which Clusius calleth Pinguicula; not before his time remembered, hath sundry small thick leaves, fat and full of juice, being broad towards the root and sharp towards the point, of a faint green colour, and bitter in taste; out of the middest whereof sprouteth or shooteth up a naked slender stalke nine inches long, every stalke bearing one flower and no more, sometimes white, and sometimes of a bluish purple colour, fas.h.i.+oned like unto the common Monkshoods” (he means Larkspurs) ”called Consolida Regalis, having the like spur or Lark's heel attached thereto.” Then after describing a third kind of Sanicle--(Cortusa Mathioli, a large-leaved Alpine Primula,) he goes on: ”These plants are strangers in England; their natural country is the alpish mountains of Helvetia. They grow in my garden, where they flourish exceedingly, except b.u.t.terwoort, which groweth in our English _squally_ wet grounds,”--('Squally,' I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson does not give this sense; but one of his quotations from Ben Jonson touches it nearly: ”Take heed that their new flowers and sweetness do not as much corrupt as the others' dryness and squalor,”--and note farther that the word 'squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, but the Arabic 'Chuaul' with an s prefixed:--the English word, a form of 'squeal,' meaning a child's cry, from Gothic 'Squaela' and Icelandic 'squilla,' would scarcely have been made an adjective by Gerarde),--”and will not yield to any culturing or transplanting: it groweth especially in a field called Cragge Close, and at Crosbie Ravenswaithe, in Westmerland; (West-_mere_-land you observe, not mor) upon Ingleborough Fells, twelve miles from Lancaster, and by Harwoode in the same county near to Blackburn: ten miles from Preston, in Anderness, upon the bogs and marish ground, and in the boggie meadows about Bishop's-Hatfield, and also in the fens in the way to Wittles Meare”

(Roger Wildrake's Squattlesea Mere?) ”from Fendon, in Huntingdons.h.i.+re.”

Where doubtless Cromwell ploughed it up, in his young days, pitilessly; and in nowise pausing, as Burns beside his fallen daisy.

12. Finally, however, I believe we may accept its English name of 'b.u.t.terwort' as true Yorks.h.i.+re, the more enigmatic form of 'Pigw.i.l.l.y'

preserving the tradition of the flowers once abounding, with softened Latin name, in Pigw.i.l.l.y bottom, close to Force bridge, by Kendal. Gerarde draws the English variety as ”Pinguicula sive Sanicula Eboracensis,--b.u.t.terwoort, or Yorks.h.i.+re Sanicle;” and he adds: ”The husbandmen's wives of Yorks.h.i.+re do use to anoint the dugs of their kine with the fat and oilous juice of the herb b.u.t.terwort when they be bitten of any venomous worm, or chapped, rifted and hurt by any other means.”

13. In Lapland it is put to much more certain use; ”it is called Tatgra.s.s, and the leaves are used by the inhabitants to make their 'tat miolk,' a preparation of milk in common use among them. Some fresh leaves are laid upon a filter, and milk, yet warm from the reindeer, is poured over them.

After pa.s.sing quickly through the filter, this is allowed to rest for one or two days until it becomes ascescent,[17] when it is found not to have separated from the whey, and yet to have attained much greater tenacity and consistence than it would have done otherwise. The Laplanders and Swedes are said to be extremely fond of this milk, which when once made, it is not necessary to renew the use of the leaves, for we are told that a spoonful of it will turn another quant.i.ty of warm milk, and make it like the first.”[18] (Baxter, vol. iii., No. 209.)

14. In the same page, I find quoted Dr. Johnston's observation that ”when specimens of this plant were somewhat rudely pulled up, the flower-stalk, previously erect, almost immediately began to bend itself backwards, and formed a more or less perfect segment of a circle; and so also, if a specimen is placed in the Botanic box, you will in a short time find that the leaves have curled themselves backwards, and now conceal the root by their revolution.”

I have no doubt that this elastic and wiry action is partly connected with the plant's more or less predatory or fly-trap character, in which these curiously degraded plants are a.s.sociated with Drosera. I separate them therefore entirely from the Bladderworts, and hold them to be a link between the Violets and the Droseraceae, placing them, however, with the Cytherides, as a sub-family, for their beautiful colour, and because they are indeed a grace and delight in ground which, but for them, would be painfully and rudely desolate.

CHAPTER III.

VERONICA.

1. ”The Corolla of the Foxglove,” says Dr. Lindley, beginning his account of the tribe at page 195 of the first volume of his 'Ladies' Botany,' ”is a large inflated body(!), with its throat spotted with rich purple, and its border divided obliquely into five very short lobes, of which the two upper are the smaller; its four stamens are of unequal length, and its style is divided into two lobes at the upper end. A number of long hairs cover the ovary, which contains two cells and a great quant.i.ty of ovules.

”This” (_sc._ information) ”will show you what is the usual character of the Foxglove tribe; and you will find that all the other genera referred to it in books agree with it essentially, although they differ in subordinate points. It is chiefly (A) in the form of the corolla, (B) in the number of the stamens, (C) in the consistence of the rind of the fruit, (D) in its form, (E) in the number of the seeds it contains, and (F) in the manner in which the sepals are combined, that these differences consist.”

2. The enumerative letters are of my insertion--otherwise the above sentence is, word for word, Dr. Lindley's,--and it seems to me an interesting and memorable one in the history of modern Botanical science.

For it appears from the tenor of it, that in a scientific botanist's mind, six particulars, at least, in the character of a plant, are merely 'subordinate points,'--namely,

1. (F) The combination of its calyx, 2. (A) The shape of its corolla, 3. (B) The number of its stamens, 4. (D) The form of its fruit, 5. (C) The consistence of its sh.e.l.l,--and 6. (E) The number of seeds in it.

Abstracting, then, from the primary description, all the six inessential points, I find the three essential ones left are, that the style is divided into two lobes at the upper end, that a number of glandular hairs cover the ovary, and that this latter contains two cells.

3. None of which particulars concern any reasonable mortal, looking at a Foxglove, in the smallest degree. Whether hairs which he can't see are glandular or bristly,--whether the green k.n.o.bs, which are left when the purple bells are gone, are divided into two lobes or two hundred,--and whether the style is split, like a snake's tongue, into two lobes, or like a rogue's, into any number--are merely matters of vulgar curiosity, which he needs a microscope to discover, and will lose a day of his life in discovering. But if any pretty young Proserpina, escaped from the Plutonic durance of London, and carried by the tubular process, which replaces Charon's boat, over the Lune at Lancaster, cares to come and walk on the Coniston hills in a summer morning, when the eyebright is out on the high fields, she may gather, with a little help from Brantwood garden, a bouquet of the entire Foxglove tribe in flower, as it is at present defined, and may see what they are like, altogether.

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