Chapter 3

Drifting against a willow bush one day, the branches of which came right down over the water like a crinoline, I saw inside, and under the branches, a number of fair-sized chub of about 1 lb. or 1-1/2 lbs. It struck me that they felt themselves absolutely safe there, and that if in any way I could get a bait over them they might take it. The entry under which I find this chronicled is August 24th. Next morning when the sun was hot I got a stiff rod and caught a few grasshoppers. Overnight I had cut out a bough or two at the back of the willow bush, and there was just a chance that I might be able to poke my rod in and drop the grasshopper on the water. After that I must trust to the strength of the gut, for the fish would be unplayable. It was almost like fishing in a faggot-stack. Peering through the willow leaves I could just see down into the water where a patch of sunlight about a yard square struck the surface. Under this skylight I saw the backs of several chub pass as they cruised slowly up and down. I twisted the last two feet of my line round the rod-top, poked this into the bush with infinite bother and pluckings at my line between the rings, and managed to drop the hopper on to the little bit of sunny water. What a commotion there was. The chub thought they were all in a sanctuary and that no one was looking. I could see six or seven of them, evidently all cronies and old acquaintances, the sort of fish that have known one another for years and would call each other by their Christian names. They were as cocky and consequential as possible, cruising up and down with an air, and staring at each other and out through the screen of leaves between them and the river, and every now and then taking something off a leaf and spitting it out again in a very independent connoisseur-like way. The moment the grasshopper fell there was a regular rush to the place, very different from what their behaviour would have been outside the bush. There was a hustle and jostle to look at it, and then to get it. They almost fought one another to get a place. Flop! Splash! Wallop! "My grasshopper, I think." "I saw it first." "Where are you shoving to?" "O--oh--what is the matter with William?" I called him William because he had a mark like a W on his back. But he was hooked fast and flopping, and held quite tight by a very strong hook and gut, like a bull with a ring and a pole fastened to his nose. I got him out too--not a big fish, but about 1-1/2 lbs.

This showed pretty clearly that where chub can be fished for "silently, invisibly," they can still be caught, even though steam launches or row-boats are passing every ten minutes. This was mid-August; my next venture nearly realised the highest ambitions of a chub-fisher. It also showed the sad limitations of mere instinctive fishing aptitudes in the human being as contrasted with the mental and bodily resources of a fish with a deplorably low facial angle and a very poor _morale_. There was just one place on the river where it seemed possible to remain unseen yet to be able to drop a bait over a chub. A willow tree had fallen, and smashed through a willow _bush_. Its head stuck out like a feather brush in front and made a good screen. On either side were the boughs of the bush, high, but not too high to get a rod over them, if I walked along the horizontal stem of the tree. It was only a small tree, and a most unpleasant platform. But I had caught a most appetising young frog, rather larger than a domino, which I fastened to the hook, and after much manoeuvring I dropped this where I knew some large chub lay. As the tree had only been blown down a day before, I was certain that they had never been fished for at that spot.

I was right; hardly had the frog touched the water when I saw a monster chub rise like a dark salamander out of the depths. Slowly he rose and eyed the frog, moving his white lips as if the very sight imparted a gusto to the natural excellence of young frogs. I nearly dropped from the tree stem from sheer suspense, when he made up his mind, put on steam, and took it! He was fast in a minute, and kindly rushed out into the river, where I played him. Then I wound in my line and hauled him up till his head and mouth were out of the water. As there was an impenetrable screen of bushes between him and me I laid the rod down, trusting to the tackle, and ran round to where close by was a farm punt, made fast. It had been used during harvest time, and was full of what in the classics they call the "implements of Ceres." All of these that do not seem made to cut your leg off are designed to run into and spike you. Besides scythes and reap hooks, there were iron rakes (sharp end upwards), wooden rakes, pitchforks, and garden forks, and the difficulty was to move in the punt without getting cut or spiked. The last users of the punt had also taken peculiar care to fasten it up. It was anchored by a grapnel, and by an iron pin on a chain, the pin eighteen inches long and driven hard into the bank. In a desperate hurry I hauled up the grapnel, did a regular Sandow feat in pulling up the iron peg, seized a punt pole apparently weighted with lead, but made out of an ash sapling, and started the punt. It would not move. I found there was another mooring, so picking my way among the scythes, spikes, rakes, &c., I hauled this in. It was most infernally heavy, and turned out to be a cast-iron wheel of a steam plough or other farming implement. Then I was under weigh, and got round to the fish. It was still there. I could see its expressionless eye (about as big as a sixpence) out of the water and its mouth wide open, when I remembered I had forgotten the landing-net in my hurry. Then came the period of mental aberration common to the amateur. The fish was certainly 4 lbs. in weight, yet I tried to get him in with my hands. Of course he gave one big flop, slipped out, and disappeared--the biggest chub I ever shall not catch.

THE WORLD'S FIRST BUTTERFLIES

Thames plants must strike every one as belonging to an ancient order of life. But the vast clouds of winged _ephemeridae_ that dance over its waters when there is a rise of "May-fly" in early summer look to be not only the creatures of a day, but of our day. In the astonishing wave and rush of life seen at such times, when from every plant and pool winged creatures are ascending to float in air, it is difficult to picture the silence and stillness of a world where there were no birds, or hum of bees, and no signs of the other insects which exceed the other population of the earth by unnumbered myriads of millions; yet the insects, even the same identical species which dance over the Thames to-day, are among the very oldest of living things, just as its plants and its shells are. Rocks and slate are not ideal butterfly cases; and if the fragile limbs of the beetle and grasshopper of the successive prehistoric worlds had perished beyond the power of identification, no one could have felt surprise. But such has been the industry of modern naturalists--to give the widest name to those who have devoted their time to the search for, and description of, fossil insects--that the remains of thousands of species have been identified, and the time of their appearance upon the earth approximately fixed. The latest contributor to this elegant branch of the study of fossils is Mr. Herbert Goss.[1] Perhaps the most interesting of his conclusions is the antiquity, not only of the existing orders of insects, but even of their particular families and genera, as compared with vertebrate animals. It is astonishing to find not only crickets and beetles existing at periods enormously earlier than the appearance of birds or fish, but that they conformed in type to the families in which they are classed to-day. Though they become fewer and fewer as they are tracked back up the river of time, there are not found in the earliest fossil-bearing rocks any connecting links or earlier and simpler forms of insect life, or a clue to the common ancestor of insects, spiders, and shrimps, which naturalists would dearly like to discover. There is a baffling completeness about these creatures. When in the lias period, for instance, the vertebrates were huge saurian reptiles and flying lizards, and scarcely any of our existing classes of fish had come into existence, the beetles, cockroaches, crickets, and white ants were there, with all the distinguishing characteristics of the existing families as they were settled by Linnaeus.

The first insect known to have existed, a creature of such vast antiquity that it deserves all the respect which the parvenu man can summon and offer to it, was--a cockroach. This, the father of all black-beetles, probably walked the earth in solitary magnificence when not only kitchens, but even kitchen-middens were undreamt of, possibly millions of years before Neolithic man had even a back cave to offer with the remains of last night's supper for the cockroach of the period to enjoy. His discovery established the fact that in the Silurian period there were insects, though, as the only piece of his remains found was a wing, there has been room for dispute as to the exact species. Mr. Goss in his preface to the second edition of his book notes that what is probably a still older insect has been found in the lower Silurian in Sweden. This was not a cockroach, but apparently something worse. If the Latin name, _Protocimex Silurius_, be literally translated, it means the original Silurian bug. It was a fair conjecture that insects appeared about the same time as land plants first grew on the earth. As almost all the species either feed on some vegetable substances in growth or decay, or else live upon other insects, some such provision of food was necessary for them. Remains of such plants were discovered in the Silurian rocks. In the Devonian formations, which contain the next oldest set of fossil insects, numbers of conifers and ferns are found. Yet even then the only vertebrate animals seem to have been fish. The insects still had the land all to themselves. Of one of these Devonian insects the base of a wing was the only part preserved in the rock. From this it was possible to tell the order to which the creature belonged. It was one of the _Neuroptera_--insects with wings in which the veins run straight down the wing, sometimes joined by cross branches at right angles. Some of the modern kinds are very beautiful four-winged flies, with bright colours on their wings like butterflies. Others are ant-lions or caddis-flies. The curve of the fragment of wing also suggested its probable size when unbroken. It was perhaps two inches long. As there are little horny rings round the wing base like those which crickets have, on which they rub their legs and so "chirp," it is also quite likely that this insect of hoary antiquity did the same, and enlivened the silence of Devonian fern groves with a prehistoric hum. It is quite in keeping with modern ideas that in that age of fishes one of the most remarkable insects should have been a kind of May-fly, "a large species of _Ephemerina_, which must have measured five inches in expanse of wings." Thus our Thames May-flies had gigantic prehistoric ancestors, which appeared on earth, possibly with their present associates the caddis flies, at an enormously remote age.

So far no butterfly had yet appeared on earth, though the _Ephemerinae_ might dance over the still lagoons and swamps. In the coal-forest period, and the age of trees and rank vegetation, insects of many kinds seem to have multiplied, even though the most beautiful of all were not yet launched in air. In England the first beetle wandered on to the stage of life--the oldest British insect fossil known. It was discovered in the ironstone of Coalbrookdale, and was a kind of weevil. Another creature found in the same ironstone was a cricket. It is quite in keeping with the forest and tree surroundings of the time that white ants should have abounded to eat up the decayed and dead wood. Strictly speaking, black-beetles are not beetles at all. But they are a very good imitation. As some hundreds of families of _Paltaeoblattidae_, which may be translated as "old original cockroaches," and _Blattidae_, or cockroaches _pur sang_, pervaded these forests, and the doyen of all Swiss fossil animals is one of these, the "state of the streets" in a coal forest may be imagined when there were no bird police to keep the insects in order. Thus the end of the Palaeozoic world--a very poor world at best--was fairly well stocked with insects, though the moths, bees, and butterflies had yet to come. Then came the sunrise of a new time--mammals, any number of reptiles, possibly some birds, and an insect life more teeming than any we now know. The "insect limestone" attests these multitudes. Beetles, of which the scarabs were a numerous family, increased vastly, and the oldest known dragon-fly and supposed ancestor of those which hawk over the Oxford river, left his skeleton, or what represents a dragon-fly's skeleton, among some two thousand other specimens of fossil insects, in the Swiss Alps. It was then that the first bird and the first butterfly appeared. The bird was the famous Archaeopteryx, found in the Solenhofen slate, and the first butterfly, to use an Irishism, was a moth, a sphinx moth, apparently about the size of the Convolvulus sphinx moth. This stone-embedded relic of the moth that sucked the juices of the plants of the Mesozoic world, incalculable ages before the time even of the gigantic mammals, is preserved in the Teyler Museum at Haarlem. When the new era of the Eocene period developed modern forms of plants, their rapid growth was accompanied by a great increase in the number of insects. Those which, like the moths, had only made their first venture on earth, now appeared in greater numbers. Near Aix, in Provence, five butterflies and two moths were found in some beds of marl and gypsum long celebrated for their fossils, and with the fossil butterflies were, in every case but one, fossil remains of the plants which had served its larvae as food. Thus the May-flies and beetles are perhaps older than the Thames shells, and older than the prehistoric plants on which the river molluscs feed.

[1] Secretary of the Entomological Society, and an accomplished botanist. The work is entitled "The Geological Antiquity of Insects," and published by Gurney and Jackson, London.

BUTTERFLY SLEEP

Fond as the butterflies are of the light and sun, they dearly love their beds. Like most fashionable people who do nothing, they stay there very late. But their unwillingness to get up in the morning is equalled by their equal desire to leave the world and its pleasures early and be asleep in good time. They are the first of all our creatures to seek repose. An August day has about fifteen hours of light, and for that time the sun shines for twelve hours at least; but the butterflies weary of sun and flowers, colour and light, so early that by six o'clock, even on warm days, many of them have retired for the night. I climbed Sinodun Hill, on a cold, windy afternoon, and found that hundreds of butterflies were all falling asleep at five o'clock. Their dormitory was in the tall, colourless grass, with dead seed-heads, that fringes the tracks over the hills, or the lanes that cross the hollows. Common blues were there in numbers, and small heath butterflies almost as many. The former, each and every one of them, arrange themselves to look like part of the seed-spike that caps the grass-stem. Then the use and purpose of the parti-coloured grey and yellow under-colouring of their wings is seen. The butterfly invariably goes to sleep head downwards, its eyes looking straight down the stem of the grass. It folds and contracts its wings to the utmost, partly, perhaps, to wrap its body from the cold. But the effect is to reduce its size and shape to a narrow ridge, making an acute angle with the grass-stem, hardly distinguishable in shape and colour from the seed-heads on thousands of other stems around.[1] The butterfly also sleeps on the top of the stem, which increases its likeness to the natural finial of the grass. In the morning, when the sunbeams warm them, all these grey-pied sleepers on the grass-tops open their wings, and the colourless bennets are starred with a thousand living flowers of purest azure. Side by side with the "blues" sleep the common "small heaths." They use the grass-stems for beds, but less carefully, and with no such obvious solicitude to compose their limbs in harmony with the lines of the plant. They also sleep with their heads downwards, but the body is allowed to droop sideways from the stem like a leaf. This, with their light colouring, makes them far more conspicuous than the blues. Moreover, as grass has no leaves shaped in any way like the sleeping butterfly, the contrast of shape attracts notice. Can it be that the blues, whose brilliant colouring by day makes them conspicuous to every enemy, have learnt caution, while the brown heaths, less exposed to risk, are less careful of concealment? Be it noticed that moths and butterflies go to sleep in different attitudes. Moths fold their wings back upon their bodies, covering the lower wing, which is usually bright in colour, with the upper wing. They fold their antennas back on the line of their wings. Butterflies raise the wings above their bodies and lay them back to back, putting their antennae between them if they move them at all. On these same dry grasses of the hills, another of the most brilliant insects of this country may often be seen sleeping in swarms--the carmine and green burnet moth. But it is a sluggish creature, which often seems scarcely awake in the day, and its surrender to the dominion of sleep excites less surprise than the deep slumber of the active and vivacious butterflies. The "heaths" and "blues" should perhaps be regarded as the gipsies of the butterfly world, because they sleep in the open. They are even worse off than the nomads, because, like that regiment sleeping in the open which the War Office lately refused to grant field allowance to on the ground that they were "not under canvas," they do not possess even a temporary roof. What we may call the "garden butterflies," especially the red admirals, often do seek a roof, going into barns, sheds, churches, verandahs, and even houses to sleep. There, too, they sometimes wake up in winter from their long hibernating sleep, and remind us of summer days gone by as they flicker on the sun-warmed panes. Mrs. Brightwen established the fact that they sometimes have fixed homes to which they return. Two butterflies, one a brimstone, the other, so far as the writer remembers, a red admiral, regularly came for admission to the house. One was killed by a rain-storm when the window was shut; the other hibernated in the house. Probably it was as a sleeping-place and bedroom that the butterflies made it their home. There is a parallel instance, mentioned by a Dutch naturalist quoted by Mr. Kirby, when a butterfly came night after night to sleep on a particular spot in the roof of a verandah in the Eastern Archipelago. In the East the sun itself is so regular and so rapid in rising and setting that the sleeping hours of insects and birds are far more regular than in temperate lands, with their shifting periods of light and darkness. Our twilight, that season that the tropics know not, has produced a curious race of moths, or rather, a curious habit confined to certain kinds. They are the creatures neither of day nor of night, but of twilight. They awake as twilight begins, go about their business and enjoy a brief and crepuscular activity, and go to sleep as soon as darkness settles on the world. At the first glimmer of the dawn they awaken again to fly till sunrise, when they hurry off like the fairies, and sleep till twilight falls again.

At the time of writing a border of bright flowers runs in straight perspective from the window opposite, with a rose arcade by the border, and a yew hedge behind that. The shafts of the morning sun fly straight down to the flowers, and every blossom of hollyhock, sunflower, campanula, and convolvulus, and the scarlet ranks of the geraniums, are standing at "attention" to welcome this morning inspection by the ruler and commander-in-chief of all the world of flowers. The inspecting officers, rather late as inspecting officers are wont to be, are overhauling and examining the flowers. These inspectors, also roused by the sun, are the butterflies and bees. Splendid red admirals are flying up, and alighting on the sunflowers, or hovering over the pink masses of valerian. Peacock butterflies, "eyed" like Emperors' robes, open and shut their wings upon the petals; large tortoiseshells are flitting from flower to flower; mouse-coloured humming-bird moths are poising before the red lips of the geraniums; and a stream of common white butterflies is crossing the lawn to the flowers at the rate of twenty a minute. They all come from the same direction, across a cornfield and meadow, behind which lies a wood. The bees came first, as they are fairly early risers; the butterflies later, some of them very late, and evidently not really ready for parade, for they are sitting on the flowers stretching, brushing themselves, and cleaning their boots--or feet. The fact is that the butterflies, late though it is, are only just out of bed. You might look all the evening to find the place where these particular butterflies sleep, and not discover it, unless some of them have taken a fancy to the verandah or the inside of a dwelling-room in the house. But each and every one of them has been asleep in a place it has chosen, and it is probable that some, the red admirals, for instance, will go back to that place to sleep at evening.

As there are hundreds of moths that fly by night and sleep by day at seasons when there are perhaps only twenty species of butterflies flying by day and sleeping by night, it is strange that the sleeping moths are not more often found. Some kinds are often disturbed, and are seen. But the great majority are sleeping on the bark of trees, in hedges, in the crevices of pines, oaks and elms, and other rough-skinned timber, and we see them not. Some prefer damp nights with a drizzle of rain to fly in, not the weather which we should choose as inviting us to leave repose. Few like moonlight nights; darkness is their idea of a "fine day" in which to get up and enjoy life, many, like the dreams in Virgil's Hades, being all day high among the leaves of lofty trees, whence they descend at the summons of night, the--

"Filmy shapes That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes, And woolly breasts, and beaded eyes,"

The connection between character and bedtime which grew up from association when human life was less complex than now has some counterpart in the world of butterflies and insects. The industrious bees go to bed much earlier than the roving wasps. The latter, which have been out stealing fruit and meat, and foraging on their own individual account, "knock in" at all hours till dark, and may sometimes be seen in a state of disgraceful intoxication, hardly able to find the way in at their own front door. The bees are all asleep by then in their communal dormitory.