Part 2

But this was not good for the plant. Those flowers that in some way became fertilized by pollen from other plants of the same variety, by cross-fertilization, in fact, were healthier and stronger than those fertilized by their own pollen. In such plants as wind-blown pollen reached this cross-fertilization was an easy matter, but the buttercup is not one of these. It is forced to rely upon insects for fertilization. So the plant began to secrete a sweet drop at the base of each green petal. Such insects as discovered this nectar and stopped to sip were dusted with the pollen of the plant and carried it to other flowers, where it fertilized the pistils, the insect gathering from every blossom a fresh burden of pollen to be carried along on his nectar-seeking round. This was very good, so far as it went, but the flowers were pale and inconspicuous, and many of them, overlooked by the insects, were never visited. Certain ones, however, owing to accidents or conditions of soil and moisture, had the calyx a little larger, or brighter colored than their fellows, and these the insects found. It happened, therefore, if anything ever does merely happen, that the flowers with bright petals were fertilized, and their descendants were even brighter colored. Thus, in time, the buttercup, by the process which, for lack of a better name, we call natural selection, came to have bright yellow petals, because these attract the insect best adapted to fertilize it ☙ If man’s æsthetic sense is gratified by the flower’s beauty, why man is by so much the better off, but that man is pleased by the bright color is not half so important to the buttercup as is the pleasure of a certain little winged beetle which sees the shining golden cup and knows that it means honey ☘ In the same way the lupin, yonder, with its pretty blue and white blossoms, has developed its blue petals because it is fertilized by the bees. They seek it as they do other blossoms, not only for honey, but for the pollen itself, which stands them in place of bread ☙ The very shape of the flower is due to the visits of countless generations of this insect. The bee is the insect best adapted to fertilize the lupin, and when he alights upon the threshold of a blossom his weight draws the lower petal down, and entering to suck the sweets he gets his head dusted with pollen. If a fly were to gain entrance to the flower, he would carry away no pollen. He is smaller than the bee, and his head could not reach it. So honey-seeking flies alight in vain; their weight is not enough to press the calyx open, so they may not enter and drink of its sweets. Yonder on a blossom of the mimulus, the odd-looking monkey-plant, a honeybee just had this same experience. The bumblebee is the only insect that is large enough to reach the pollen in this blossom, and so its doors will open only to him. Botanists tell us that all this great family, to which belong the various peas blossoms and their cousins, were once five-petaled plants, but natural selection has brought about their present shape, which is an admirable protection against the depredations of small insects that could only rob but could not fertilize the flowers ❧

Blue is the favorite color of the honeybee, and next to blue he prefers red. So bee blossoms are blue or red.

Most of our small white flowers are fertilized by insects that fly at night. This is the reason why white blossoms are more fragrant than their bright-hued sisters. Bright colors could not be seen at night, but the fragrance of the white flowers, always more noticeable by night than by day, serves the same end—to attract the useful insects. This is an essential part of Nature’s wonderful plan. The flower lives by giving ☙

There is an endless fascination in this page which Nature opens out before us, in her upland pastures. A wise teacher once told me his experience with a restless, unmanageable boy ☙ “I could do nothing with him,” the teacher said, “until I got him interested in field life.” One day this boy went off on a holiday tramp, returning the day following. His teacher asked him what he had seen, and this is what he remembered of his outing: “I camped in a field for the night,” said he, “and I saw a bee light on a poppy and crawl in. The poppy shut up and caught him. Next morning I woke up early and watched, and by and by the poppy opened and the bee came out.” ☙ There are those who might have missed the sacred significance of such a narrative, but that teacher was a very wise man and he knew that the reading lesson given him then was a page from his rough boy’s soul-life, and he conned it with reverent delight. Life together was more real for them both after that day.

The keener our realization of the human love that is in the flowers, in the trees, in all the wild life about us, the richer is our humanity, the fuller our reception of life and love, the more thoughtful our use of all the things of Nature becomes ❧ Once I saw an oriole weaving some bits of string into his nest. He hung head downwards, by one string, from a projecting branch, and worked, for nearly an hour, with beak and claws. Then he flew away, triumphant. Later I saw his nest and understood his action. He tied two pieces of string together in a very respectable sort of knot: had wound the long cord thus obtained in and out among the meshes of his nest and then, giving it a half-hitch about a twig, had brought the free end up and tied it securely to another small branch ❧

I felt grateful for what that bird had accomplished. All human achievements seemed to me worthier after seeing him do this thing. Nature teaches us so much if we will but keep still long enough to let her: if we will only empty ourselves of conceit and knowingness, and get rid of the notion that all things, Nature included, are made for us. We are not the lords of creation. We are only a small part, albeit the highest part, of it all, and the better we learn this lesson the better men and women we shall become.

I was sitting here beside the stream, watching the bees swarm in and out at the entrance to their hive, when Hercules passed by. “Come and watch the bees,” I called as he passed. “They are interesting.” ☘

He stood and studied the busy workers, intent upon the business of their miniature society ☘

“I wonder,” he said at last, “if our human reason shall ever evolve a system half so perfect as the one that mere instinct has taught these feeble insects.” As I was silent he continued:

“Well, at all events, I can learn one lesson from the bees, and be about my business. If society is ever to be freed from its burdens every soul must do its full duty. One life wasted means a whole world hindered just that much.” And Hercules was gone to his labors ❧

How fearful we all are of wasting our lives, yet so rarely fearful for the results of the ceaseless activity with which we crowd them ❦ But Hercules’ words are full of suggestiveness. Is our boasted human reason really less adequate to the needs of our life than is what we call the instinct, this thing that looks so much more reasonable than our reason, of the lower orders? What if, after all, we are making a desperate mistake in supposing that it is this faculty which we call reason that distinguishes us from the brute creation?

It is because the bees and the other dumb creatures have nothing more than this measure of reason which we call instinct, that it serves them perfectly. Man has something else, that draws him higher; that prompts him further. But alas for us! With the destiny to live perfectly as human beings, we yet long for the restrictions through which we may live perfectly as the beasts. We seek our lessons from the brutes while the Eternal waits to teach us. We cannot live like the beasts. The divine human spark within us will not let us. We must live higher than they or we shall live lower, for our perfection of order is infinitely higher than theirs, and our failure immeasurably lower than they can sink ❧

But we go on, we modern Athenians, seeking to ameliorate the conditions we have brought upon society by our own stupid disobedience and inhumanity, and only now and then do we have a faint suspicion that our newest thoughts are but mere rephrasings of ideas old as thought itself ❧

Men get these new sets of phrases and dress therein the ideas that underlie the universe. We apply the terms of science to the old faiths and think we have invented a new religion. We find new names for God Himself, and believe ourselves to have discovered a new life-principle ☙ Loving the neighbor becomes enlightened altruism, and lo, faith is born anew, with a subtiler power to redeem the world.

Hercules is a Socialist. He always spells society with a great S, and he declares in the present state of Society we can take no thought for individuals ☘ “The individual may perish,” he says, in moments of eloquence, “but the integrity of Society must be jealously maintained.” ☙

I wonder, as I sit here watching the bees, whether Society might not, after all, find easement from its ails if each individual of us, myself and Hercules included, should pay strict attention to our individual business of growing, or becoming humanized? ✪

Just here at my hand a bee has alighted and is burying its nose in a clover blossom. Here is an example of a life that is lived only for Society, yet so important is the individual in the opinion of this highly perfected body social, that I have seen half a dozen bees, when a laden worker has arrived at the hive opening, weighted down, too exhausted to do other than drop, helpless, upon the threshold, rush to its assistance, relieve it of its heavy load and help it to pass within to gather strength for further effort. The strict individualist complains, in turn, of the bees because they have no individual life; no existence separate from the hive. This is true, but what higher individuality can any creature desire than is comprised and summed up in the divine opportunity to bring his individual gift to the common store?

I have picked the clover blossom that the bee just left. Beside it are growing other blossoms, and I gather a couple. They are the veriest wayside weeds—dandelion and dog-fennel—but they are important because they are typical representatives of the largest order in the floral kingdom; an order which, although it was the last to appear in the vegetable world, has outstripped every other and leads them all today. Botanists call it the Composite Order. Its members are really floral socialists, just as Hercules and the rest of us who believe that government is an order of nature, and good for the race, are human socialists, whether we know it or not.

But most of us hold a mistaken idea about the relation of the individual to the whole. We are apt to theorize that it is the duty of the individual to keep the whole in order, and a good many of us are fully convinced that the world owes us a living. So it does, and it behooves each one of us to be faithful in discharging his individual share of the aggregate debt ❧ Nature has a whole page about that in her wonderful volume ❧

Take, for instance, this clover. What we call the blossom is, in reality, many blossoms ☙ Look at the mass under a glass. You will see that the clover head is made up of numerous minute cups in a compact cluster. Each cup is a perfect blossom. As we now see it in the clover it is a tiny tube, but it once possessed five slender petals which are now united ☙ The little pointed scollops that rim the cup suggest these petals. Now, the tiny cup is descended from a five-petaled ancestor, growing upon its individual stem and depending upon insects for its fertilization. The flower was small, however, and many of them must have been overlooked by the insects ❧

But those blossoms that, growing very close together, formed little clusters, were more conspicuous than the solitary ones, and were discovered, visited for their honey and incidentally fertilized by the winged freebooters. These blossoms bore fruit and their descendants inherited the social instinct prompting them to draw together that each might give the other its help and co-operation in attracting the insects. So, by degrees, the co-operative habit became fixed in the clover, and in many other plants, until the compositæ became a botanical fact. In other words, the individuals formed a body social of their own, growing from a compact cluster from a common stem, each giving and receiving, constantly, its use and share in the common life. The many-petaled flowers found it inconvenient to arrange themselves in the composite order, and so, as we see in the clover, the petals have pressed closely together and united to form a tube-shaped flower, and as the tubular form is best adapted to receive fertilization by the bee, which insect is the most useful to the clover blossom, that form has been perpetuated in this plant.

Thus by the simple process of each individual giving itself to the common life, the mutual protection and development of the whole, this order of plants has become the largest in the floral kingdom. The compositæ have circled the globe. They fill our hothouses and flourish in our gardens; they greet us by the dusty road, and in the summer woods. The lovely golden-rod, the sturdy asters, the aristocratic chrysanthemums, the dainty daisies all belong to this great order. So does helianthus, the big, beaming sunflower.

It is quite true that each blossom of the compositæ has given its life to the race. But what if, after all, life with our fellows is a giving instead of the receiving we are wont to think it? ❧ What if, after all, the true outlook upon Society will one day show us that our neighbor is put here that we may have the great, the inestimable joy of living for him? ❧

All matter is made up of molecules, Science tells us, and there is another Voice as of one having authority, which tells us that One hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell upon the face of the earth ❧

We humans are but larger molecules in the body social. We live only in so far as the common life flows through us. We never fully, in our plans, and by a wonderful provision of Divine Wisdom we cannot give one another that which is really and unmistakably our own. No human thought, even, ever traveled a straight course from one human soul to another and was received exactly as it was sent. We live our lives each within the molecular envelope of his individual body, and we can no more mix, in reality, than the molecules mix. We live only in the flux and reflux of the Life of all, and only as we pass this on have power to receive.

It is when life is fullest that we turn to our fellows. Those of us who are true know that then we need them most, and so, our real drawings together are in order that we may give. We know this in that secret part of us where lies what most of us call our human weakness, but we are faithless to the knowledge, and choose to live on a lower plane, within that outer circle which we call knowing ☙ We think we come together to receive, but who of us does not know the emptiness of death that lies in such coming? We are all a little better than this. In secret we know that it is more blessed to give than receive, but we are ashamed of the knowledge ❦

We are less simple and true than the dandelion, the dog-fennel and the sweet-clover here in the grass. The small common blossoms grow so cheerily one is glad to come back to them. It is true that not one wee tube or strap or head in any cluster could have much life outside the aggregate blossom, but the integrity and perfection of each is an essential factor in the integrity and perfection of the whole. The tiny single flower that I can pull from this dandelion seems but an insignificant speck, but, by and by, could it have been let alone, it would, its ripeness and perfection attained, have taken to itself wings and sailed fluffily off upon the breeze to renew its life perhaps a thousand miles from here. Seeing it float through the air a poet might have found it a theme for a sonnet. A scientist might have seen universal law embodied in its structure, or a seer have reasoned from it to life eternal.

Yet, but for the co-operation of its fellows in the body floral, it could not have lived any more than, save for its fellows, what we know as the dandelion could have lived. The law of co-operation, like all of Nature’s laws, makes for rightness and fitness all along the line ⚜ She teaches us, with ever-repeated emphasis, the lesson of independence of kind. The isolated being is, everywhere, the comparatively helpless being. The tree growing by itself in the open field often attains to more symmetrical perfection and beauty than the tree in the crowded forest, but woodmen tell us that the forest tree makes better timber ☙

We must live with and for our fellows, but he does this best who, in the quiet order of the common life, opens widest his soul to the Source thereof, and growing to the full stature of a man helps on to perfection what should be that composite flower of the race, our human civilization.

The little spring here gushes up and then sweeps away along a stony bed overgrown with brakes and tares. On its margin, amid a tangle of wild blackberry, I have come upon a forest of scouring-rush ☙

It is a quaint growth. I love to put my face close to the earth and, looking through the rushes’ green stems, to fancy myself a wee brownie, wandering among a ☘ dense wilderness of pines. The development of the miniature trees is an interesting process ❦ First the ground is covered with slender brown fingers ❧ thrusting up through the soil. These grow rapidly, and in a few days spread out their brief, verticillate branches to the breeze, as proudly as any great tree might do. Here is a tiny finger just pointing upward; yonder towers the giant of the lilliputian forest, fully half-a-foot high. “Scouring-weed,” says the farmer, contemptuously, “they aint no good. Some call ’em horsetail.”

In fact, the queer, witchy little things have a number of names: candle-rush, scouring-rush, horsetail, and their own proper appellation, equisetum. I have gathered a number of the little trees and they lie side by side in my palm while my mind tries to recall a few of the facts that go to make up the plant’s wonderful history. Our grandmothers used to strew their floors with it, that no careless tread might soil the snowy boards. They used it, as well, for scouring, hence its name. Those who seek correspondences between the natural and physical kingdoms find the rush an emblem of cleansing, and this is precisely the office which, since earliest creation, it has filled for the world. For our scouring-rush was not always the puny, insignificant thing we see it. It belongs to the carboniferous age. It has nothing to do with our modern civilization. It had reached its highest perfection and entered upon its downward career before man appeared on the earth. Its progenitors flourished with the giant ferns, the great, rank mosses, and all the rest of the carbon-storing vegetation. A mighty tree was our little rush in those days, growing several hundred feet tall and spreading out its huge whorls of branches in every direction. So we find it today, in the anthracite beds of the eastern slope. What happened to it that we should know it, living, as this degenerate creature of the bog?

In the carboniferous age the air surrounding the earth was much warmer than at present, warmer than we find it in the tropics. The great mass which constitutes this globe was not yet cool enough to support any very high forms of life. There were no trees, as we now understand the word, and there was very little animal life. Beetles crawled about, spiders and scorpions, and salamanders big as alligators, but there were no mammals, no birds ❧ The world was in twilight, reeking with moisture, steaming in the warm air which it filled with all sorts of noxious gases. It rained aquafortis and brimstone, and the sweating earth sent these up again in deadly fog-banks of poisonous vapor ❧

These were the conditions that our big rush loved. Its huge spongy stem and branches drank in life from the death-laden atmosphere. Its great creeping rootstocks soaked it up from the morass beneath and the rush grew luxuriantly. Its office was indeed a cleansing one, to purify the atmosphere and make it fit to sustain animal life. In time, as the huge primeval trees reached maturity, they died, and the mighty stems fell back in the bog. Then came some great upheaval, some cataclysm of nature such as we find everywhere recorded in her rocky books. The land rose or sank, and the rocks and debris of the sea floor were thrown upon the decaying vegetation. It was pressed and compressed beneath this weight. The fronds of the huge ferns; the tall stems of the giant rushes; the monstrous club-mosses, and the primeval forest became a peat-bog. Still greater pressure—a longer lapse of aeons, and the peat became coal.

We burn them now, in our grates, the progenitors of these feeble things lying here, limply, in my palm. Is it not, as I said, a wonderful history the frail thing has. A degenerate stock, botanists call it. So are its cousins the ferns degenerate, with no botanical Nordau to sound warning against them. But degenerates tho’ they all are, they have still the spirit of the pioneer. They dwell in the outposts of vegetable civilization. We do not find them flourishing where Nature is in her gentlest moods ❦ Once, down in the crater of an active volcano, half-a-mile from any soil, growing from a sulphur-stained black-lava floor, I found a clump of waving green ferns, as high as my head, spreading out their broad fronds as though to cover and hide the terrible nakedness of the unfinished earth. A thousand years from now a grain-field may spread where now those frail green plumes have just begun their gracious work.

This clothing of the earth and the cleansing of the air are the tasks the giant rushes helped to perform for the young world. During the process the rank gases of the atmosphere were gradually stored up within their great stems. Liberated, now, in our grates and retorts they give us heat and light. Then, the atmosphere becoming purer, the earth cooled and life sustaining, new growths appeared. All the conditions were improved, but the improvement meant death to the big rush. It was starving. It could not find food in the thin air. Its roots could not suck up enough moisture to sustain life. It became smaller and smaller. Flowers and seeds it had never borne. It now gave up its leaves. Between every two whorls of branches on the scouring-rush we find a little brown, toothed sheath encircling the stem. In the days of the plants’ prosperity each of these teeth was a leaf, but now the rush can maintain no such extravagance as leaves, so there remain only these poor survivals. The stem is hollow, and is divided, between the whorls of branches, into closed sections, or joints. It has also an outer ring of hollow tubes, through which moisture is drawn up from the soil, to feed the branches. The rush is a little higher order of creation than the fern, but it is a cryptogram; that is, a plant never bearing true seeds, but propagating by spores ❧

And so, fallen upon hard lines, chilled, stunted by the cold, but having a brief span of life when the spring rains have made the earth wet and warm, and before the summer heat has come to wither it, we have our scouring-rush only a few inches high.