Part 9

For some years I was puzzled to account for a peculiar mutilation which I often observed on the dandelion. It was always at the same place--the calyx of the blossom--the green portion which incloses the bud, and, after blooming, closes again about the withered flower, and so remains while the seeds are growing. Most of my readers have seen dandelion flowers in all their stages of growth. The flower usually blooms for three mornings. By this time all the tiny yellow flowerets which make up the yellow cushion have bloomed. The green calyx now closes, to remain closed, for a week, while the stem generally bends outward, and thus draws the withered flower towards the ground, often hiding it beneath the leaves.

During this week of retirement the stem continues to wither sideways, and the flower is busy ripening its seeds, each yellow floweret having a seed of its own, from which there grows a slender hair-like stalk with a tiny feathered parachute at its top. Gradually these little feathery ends push upward inside the calyx, and on the seventh day, lo! the withered dandelion has appeared again at the top of the grass. It now has a tiny brown cap at its top, or perhaps has just lost it, and gives us a glimpse of a white feathery tuft peeping from its top. This little brown withered cap is all that is left of the original golden blossom of two weeks before, now a shrivelled mass, which has gradually been pushed upward and out by the growing seed-tuft. In another hour, perhaps, the calyx will again open, and bend down against the stem, while the bed at the bottom to which the seeds are attached will round upward through the feathers outward in the form of a ball. This rounded seed-bed, or receptacle, as it is called in our botany, shortly withers, and the winged parachutes take flight at the slightest zephyr, whereas at first a smart breeze would have been required.

Now all this is by-the-way, for not every one understands how the dandelion ball is made. I know a little bird, however, who has found it out to her advantage. I have just alluded to a certain mutilation of this calyx which puzzled me. I have shown one of these calyxes in my title picture, at the right, one-half of it being torn off, and disclosing a cavity. Where are the seeds? "Ah! some rare caterpillar has done this!" I exclaimed, when I first observed the burglary. In vain I hunted among the leaves to find him. Again and again I found my rifled dandelion, but never a sign of the burglar. But one day I surprised him at his work. It was no caterpillar, but a tiny, black bird with a beautiful rosy band in his tail, and which proved to be that butterfly among the birds, the redstart. I hardly knew what he was doing out there among the dandelions, and presumed he was after my mysterious caterpillar, until I chanced to see him alight near by with a white tuft in his bill. Yes, a tuft with feathery parachutes in a bunch on one side of his bill, and a compact cluster of seeds on the other.

In a moment I was among the dandelions from which he had flown, and soon found my empty calyx, from which an entire dandelion ball had been taken at one pinch. I lost no time in tracing out the nest in the foot of an apple-tree close by. A dainty fabric it was, exquisitely adorned with gray lichens and skeletonized leaves, its interior very plentifully lined with the seeds of the dandelion, more so than is usual with the nests of this bird. On two occasions since I have seen other small birds of the warbler kind suspiciously rummaging among the dandelions, and have afterwards discovered the empty calyx. There is probably more than one dandelion burglar.

The Troubles of the House-fly

Quite contrary to my original intention, my specimen of _Musca domestica_, which I had captured at random to serve as my model in the present chapter, has suggested that I begin with a Q, and after some expressive criticism on the matter I have at last consented to humor him, especially as he proved otherwise a most unique and accommodating individual. Being in need of a good, healthy, toe-twisting, neck-twirling specimen to sit for his portrait in an illustration for a forthcoming article on the paper wasp, I cast my eye about my easel. There, right at my elbow, still plying his never-ending toilet, I beheld him--strange coincidence, was it not? A sweep of my hand, and I have him! And in a moment more, with the tips of his toes besmeared with glue, he is a secure prisoner on the white paper before me.

The victim having served his purpose, I was preparing to drench him with a few drops of water to dissolve his bonds and set him free, when I happened to observe a feature which had before escaped my notice. The glue had chanced to secure one of its feet well beneath its body, and now that it was released I discovered that I had made considerably more of a catch with that sweep of my hand than I had imagined. Attached to one of the terminal joints of the front leg there appeared a tiny red object, which I instantly recognized as a curious tag which I had seen before, and which forms an occasional lively episode in the life not only of house-flies but other flies as well. And what a queer-shaped tag it is, to be sure! It is not easy to describe its dimensions on account of its changeable proportions--now spreading out its two long appendages, now contracting into an oblong or rounded outline, or sprawled out in the shape of a curious letter T, and now thrown about in such a helter-skelter fashion by the antics of the fly that nothing but the fact of its red color is discernible. But when we bring our magnifying-glass to bear upon it, its diminutive size is forgotten, while its shape is now perfectly familiar to us all--a lobster! a veritable live young lobster, and what is even more strange, a live boiled lobster at that! No, it must be a crab lobster, for was ever the liveliest lobster in its greenest stages half so spry as this warlike midge, whose free, upraised, open claws threaten to nip our fingers off as we hold the lens above him. But nag and prod him as we will, no provocation will induce him to loosen his grip on his means of transport.

For how many days, I wonder, has he been on this particular flying trip? How many miles has he travelled, and what varied experiences has he survived! How many are the lumps of sugar, the drops of molasses, the slices of bread, and pats of butter over which he has been trailed, to say nothing of puddles of fresh ink! And then think of the many hours in which, from his present position, he must have conspicuously figured at that toe-twisting toilet of his host! Fancy brushing your coat and combing your hair with a live boiled lobster!

But pollen grains are not pumpkins and footballs and tea-boxes, as the microscope would have us believe; nor does the drop of water contain a herd of strange elephants. Can it be possible that this lobster is, after all, only about an eighth of an inch long, with its claws spreading barely three-sixteenths of an inch? Yes, true; but we must remember that the fly is only about one-third of an inch long, and we can imagine how proportionately formidable the little beast must appear as a lurking foe and a handicap to the fly fraternity. I have therefore pictured this little episode of fly-time somewhat from the aspect of the fly. This was one of the "troubles" which I had in mind as I prepared the initial design with its letter O. I had counted on using an old specimen of the lobster which I had safely stowed away in a pill-box somewhere, until my haphazard fly victim supplied me with a fresh specimen, and subsequently helped me out in the completion and modification of my initial.

A correct idea of the anatomy of the little crab may be obtained from my illustration. But what is it all about, this funny ride on a fly's hind-leg? Excepting as an inconvenience and encumbrance it is doubtful whether the fly is much the worse for his close attachment, and while this mimic crab or lobster cannot be called a frequent passenger, a careful scrutiny of any considerable assemblage of flies on white paper or window-pane will occasionally show us the animated and persistent red tag.

But let us call him a lobster no more, rather one of the "False Scorpions," one of the group known as _Pedipalpi_, in the books: queer little creatures that live in dusty nooks, among old books and papers, and feed on tiny mites and other minute life which harbor them, but born rovers withal, with a singular fancy for fly-toes and free rides.

But the false scorpion may be considered rather as a bother than a serious trouble to the fly. His real troubles are too numerous to mention. His life, as most of my readers will be glad to learn, is not a bed of roses, as is commonly supposed. Just think for a moment what a fly's existence must be. With the deadly fly-paper on the one hand, the continual danger of being cemented into a pellet of pulp in the maw of a hornet, or impaled on the beak of his murderous relative the "Laphria-fly," or snapped up by birds, toads, snakes, he certainly has abundant use for that head full of eyes of his. All summer long he runs the gantlet of risks like these, but in September and October a new and terrible danger awaits him, and fortunate is he if he escapes in these advanced days of scientific discovery, when so many of our mortal ills are shown to be dependent upon the malignity of hovering germs, of microbes, bacteria, and bacilli.

Let us be thankful we have at least escaped the notice of one of this insidious throng, and are spared the grotesque horror of such a fate as the germ-scourge of flydom. How swift and terrible is its course! Today a pert and gladsome innocent, sipping on the rim of our dinner-plate; to-morrow a pale, dry relic of his former self, hanging from the window-pane by its tongue, and enveloped in a white shroud of mould, the victim of a germ or spore. Look where we will upon the window on those September and October days and we see the little smoky cloud with the dangling fly in its midst, and many an apparently modest and considerate fly upon the wall will be found similarly fixed to the surface, and surrounded with the white nimbus.

But the real mischief was done perhaps early in the evening, after our fly had retired for the night. He presumably experienced the first attack of acute dyspepsia he had ever known. In his promiscuous feeding he had chanced to imbibe a spore, which once within his vitals began its murderous work, growing so fast as to completely fill his swelling body by morning, when, having completed its growth and penetrated through the insect's skin, it spread its own spores, to be wafted hither and yon to the peril of next year's flies, and the consequent delight of the tidy house-keeper.

Such is the work of the world-renowned fly-fungus, of which a writer says: "It silences more house-flies than all the brushes, traps, poisons, whacks, and swearing devoted to the extermination of the insect."

Tendrils

Careless observation of Nature is responsible for some curious misrepresentations of her most simple facts. Even those of us who stand somewhat in the relation of nature teachers--namely, artists, both draughtsmen and painters, and from whom we have a right to expect absolute fidelity--are not free from our shortcomings as truthful chroniclers. Thus how often we see otherwise beautiful landscapes marred by features which rebel against all laws of natural philosophy--of a storm sky above a sunlit scene, for instance, spanned by the arc of the rainbow, and with all the shadows of trees and other objects thrown sidewise! Then there is that inverted or very "dry" crescent moon in western twilight skies; and how seldom do we see the beautiful law of the twining tendril appreciated in the most careful design of the botanical draughtsman!

For years the tendril was to me the conventional spiral, twisting like a continuous curl or spring from the parent branch to the support within its clasp; and it is safe to assert that not one in--well, a good many of us, who should have gone out to our grape-vine or passion-vine or melon-patch, without a previous forewarning, would have been able to tell correctly the pretty little story of its tendril methods, or have even noted the curious little kink which is the infallible peculiarity of the climbing tendril.

What _is_ a tendril--botanically speaking? That depends. It is one thing in this plant, quite another in that, so students of vegetable anatomy or morphology soon discover.

It is soon perfectly plain that the stem is a modified root. For instance, plants have been taken up from the sod and replaced in the ground upsidedown, the roots subsequently becoming stems, and bearing leaves, and the buried leafy stems assuming the functions of roots. Leaves are mere modified branches, and the flowers modified leaves. Pistils and stamens in flowers are modified petals, or rather petals are modified stamens, the "doubling" of flowers representing the being thus accomplished, while the petals again are mere changed leaves. A neighbor of mine has a bush bearing green roses--all leaves. In the water-lily you will find it difficult to determine just where the stamen ends and the petals begin, so gradual is the blending. In the peony the same is true, and carried still further in the merging of petals and calyx into the approximate leaves.

And so it is with tendrils. In certain plants the point of the leaf, through ages of "natural selection," has gradually been prolonged into a slender arm, which clasps the branches of trees, and enables the plant thus endowed to climb higher to sun and sky, and thus to thrive more vigorously than its less fortunate brothers. The plant so advantageously equipped transmits its tendency to its offspring, and has therefore survived in place of its ancient fellows, and is the type perpetuated or "selected" by nature. Such a tendril, then, is a modified leaf. How is it in the pea? Here we find four leaflets in two opposite pairs, but _no odd leaflet_ at the end of the main stalk, such as we see in almost all other plants of its family. But in place of this leaflet we find a branching tendril reaching out on all sides for conquest. How quietly by the aid of these eager arms the sweet-pea climbs to the top of its brush! In the common catbrier or smilax we see two slender thread-like tendrils growing from the base of each leaf. Here we have another modification, a development of the "stipule," that tiny pointed growth common to many leaves, and particularly notable at the base of a rose leaf. Still another plan has been evolved in the grape-vine. If we examine our grape arbor in June we find a number of drooping, swaying branches. The leaves are scattered singly at intervals of a few inches along the branch, each of the upper ones being attended on its opposite side by a drooping cluster of mignonette-scented blossoms. Thus they follow down towards the tip of the branch, where the clusters suddenly cease, and are replaced by long, slender, curving and branched tendrils, sometimes ten inches long. We might thus reasonably assume the tendril in this case to be a modified blossom cluster, but there is no need for us ever to assume such a thing. If we will only search with sufficient care we shall at last discover the absolute proof of the fact in a tendril which is partly in blossom, the nearest leaf-joint above it having a full cluster of blossoms, and the tendril below it, nearer the tip, not a few scattered flower-buds at its tips. This grape-vine instance may be taken as a demonstration that in no case is the tendril a special or primal organ, but merely an old one adapted to a new purpose. In one instance from a leaf, in another from a flower-stalk, just which can generally be determined by a sufficient search for the telltale _intermediate form_ somewhere to be found on the plant.

Among the most beautiful of all tendrils are those of the passion-flower and plants of the melon family, notably the wild star-cucumber, whose portrait is here presented. It is a more or less common weed, to be found about gardens and barn-yards, where it covers the fences with its profuse, clambering growth, its stalks everywhere entangled or drawn close to support by their long, green, spiral springs, and its free, branching, young tendril tips reaching out in all directions for fresh foothold, and in its absence content at length with a friendly intertwining among themselves, and a consequent tangle of green convolutions. It is hard to believe that these long, outreaching arms at the summit of this vine are identical with the closely twisted spirals below, but such is the case; let any one of them once feel the contact of even the frailest support of twig or stalk, and it is soon close in the embrace of its eager tip, and the contraction of the spring commences, but the method of this contraction is worth our study.

In order for this tendril to coil it must _twist_, and it is perfectly plain on general principles that with both ends held fast twisting is impossible. But this little paradox is evidently dismissed by the tendril. If we tie a short string between two given points, and attempt to twist it with our finger and thumb, we succeed in turning the string, 'tis true, but the twist on the right side neutralizes that on the left, being in the opposite direction. In this way only can the cord be twisted. If we twist with sufficient patience we may imitate the coil of the tendril, which is performed precisely in this way. Herein lies the secret of that little loop or kink in the centre of all tendrils--a given point, which cannot be determined on the extended tendril, but whose mission is to _reverse_ the twist in opposite directions as soon as the tip has secured its contact, and thus permit the coiling process to proceed. In tendrils of exceeding length several of these reverse loops may be found at regular intervals, sometimes as many as six in a single tendril, but the coiling process usually awaits this contact. Unsatisfied tendrils of the grape, for instance, will remain unchanged through the entire season, or until their sensitive touch has been lost. Others, like those of the passion-flower, will occasionally become discouraged and curl up all by themselves, in which case, the other tip being free, the curl is perfect and continuous and without the reverse loop, which is now unnecessary. But the function of the tendril is to clasp and hold. Its growth is not complete until thus quickened by the new responsibility. Tendrils on duty become tough and sinewy in comparison to their idling neighbors. How firm and rigid are these swollen coils upon the grape-vine!

We do not gather "figs from thistles," but some equally incongruous botanical associates are sometimes brought about through the insinuating and clambering methods of the tendril. Have we not all seen apple-trees bearing pumpkins or squashes or gourds, all originally carried thither in the form of great yellow blossoms or tender shoots! The grape-vine occasionally plays a singular botanical prank in the orchard. Here is a drooping tendril which has been swinging about for weeks from its vine canopy on the old apple-tree. It had become almost discouraged, when a chance-favoring breeze wafted its tip in contact with an apple close by. It was its last chance; with its hooked extremity it clasped the stem of the fruit, and soon made itself fast with three or four firm coils. Doubtless the little reversing loop somewhere along the tendril was also awakened from its chronic lethargy, and did its best to start the coil. Presumably it succeeded, for the pull was sufficient to dislodge the apple, which, falling to the entire length of the tendril, was still held fast in the grip, whose new responsibility had given it new strength.

And there our apple hung for weeks, swinging like a pendulum from the slender grape-vine, the coils on duty still keeping their firm grip on the stem, even though all above were straightened by the weight of the burden.

A Strange Story of a Grasshopper

A few days ago, while returning from a walk, I chanced to observe a dead grasshopper upon the dirt at the side of the road. Now this incident would not have been of special importance had I not discovered, upon careful _post-mortem_ examination, the very remarkable manner of the insect's death, which recalled a similar surprising episode of several years ago which I had almost forgotten. Upon referring to my note-book of that period, however, I found considerable space devoted to the incident, which greatly astonished me at the time. Inasmuch as it presents in a startling light the wonderful and strange resources by which nature holds in check the too rapid increase of species and maintains the great law of equilibrium among the insect forces, it is well worth recalling in these pages, in the firm belief that my young entomological readers will henceforth look more compassionately and tenderly upon the poor "high-elbowed grig" who is the unfortunate hero of my story. He is familiar to us all, that hovering "rattler" above the hot, dusty road of August, flying up from nowhere beneath our feet in the path, fluttering like a yellow moth, and always disappearing before our eyes when he alights. He is also known as the "Quaker," from his drab suit and bonnet, and his generosity with his "molasses" is proverbial from the days of the Pilgrim settlers. Who would have believed that such a fate as the following lay in store for him.

In previous papers I have indicated some of the remarkable pranks which the various ichneumon-flies play with unsuspecting caterpillars. The polyphemus, for instance, whose cocoon, filled with hopes of a beautiful butterfly existence, yields only a swarm of wasps. The caterpillars are helpless, and would seem an easy prey to the wily fly who lays her eggs upon them; but even the agile-winged "Quaker," and doubtless many of his kind--yes, and still more agile insects--are not quick enough to escape a like fate.

At the time of my discovery I had in preparation an article for "Harper's Magazine" entitled "Among Our Footprints." I wished to describe and illustrate a singular battle which I had shortly before observed between a large red mutilla ant and a "Quaker." The mutilla I had captured at the time, and had preserved as a specimen. I needed only the grasshopper to complete my drawing. Directly in front of my city house a number of vacant grassy lots offered a favorite haunt for the insects--I used to call it the Quaker camp-meeting ground--and I started out to procure one. Having no net, I was soon convinced that I was greatly at a disadvantage. The thermometer was about 90°, and, of course, the "Quakers," being in their element, had much the best, not to say the easiest, time of it. I at length gave up the chase, and was about leaving the field, when fortune favored me by the discovery of a clumsy specimen, which seemed unable to fly for any great length, and he was soon captured. Upon examination his wings seemed partially paralyzed, but otherwise he appeared to be in good health and spirits, his hind legs being especially lively and snappy. I immediately took the insect to my studio, and pinned him through the thorax. He was strong enough to pull out the pin from the board and jump around the room with it in my temporary absence.

I lost no time in taking his portrait, which figured in the illustration to the article on "Footprints" as "the ungainly victim," I little dreaming when I gave him such a title what a remarkable sort of victim he even then was. The drawing took me about ten minutes. I then left the studio, and was absent precisely fifteen minutes. Upon returning I found the grasshopper dead.