Proserpina Volume I Part 9

THE BARK.

1. Philologists are continually collecting instances, like our friend the French critic of Virgil, of the beauty of finished language, or the origin of unfinished, in the imitation of natural sounds. But such collections give an entirely false idea of the real power of language, unless they are balanced by an opponent list of the words which signally fail of any such imitative virtue, and whose sound, if one dwelt upon it, is destructive of their meaning.

2. For instance. Few sounds are more distinct in their kind, or one would think more likely to be vocally reproduced in the word which signified them, than that of a swift rent in strongly woven cloth; and the English word 'rag' and ragged, with the Greek [Greek: rhegnumi], do indeed in a measure recall the tormenting effect upon the ear. But it is curious that the verb which is meant to express the actual origination of rags, should rhyme with two words entirely musical and peaceful--words, indeed, which I always reserve for final resource in pa.s.sages which I want to be soothing as well as pretty,--'fair,' and {171} 'air;' while, in its orthography, it is identical with the word representing the bodily sign of tenderest pa.s.sion, and grouped with a mult.i.tude of others,[44] in which the mere insertion of a consonant makes such wide difference of sentiment as between 'dear' and 'drear,' or 'pear' and 'spear.' The Greek root, on the other hand, has persisted in retaining some vestige of its excellent dissonance, even where it has parted with the last vestige of the idea it was meant to convey; and when Burns did his best,--and his best was above most men's--to gather pleasant liquid and l.a.b.i.al syllabling, round gentle meaning, in

"Bonnie la.s.sie, will ye go, Will ye go, will ye go, Bonnie la.s.sie, will ye go, To the birks of Aberfeldy?"

he certainly had little thought that the delicately crisp final k, in birk, was the remnant of a magnificent Greek effort to express the rending of the earth by earthquake, in the wars of the giants. In the middle of that word 'esmarag[=e]se,' we get our own beggar's 'rag' for a pure root, which afterwards, through the Latin frango, softens into our 'break,' and 'bark,'--the 'broken thing'; that idea of its rending around the tree's stem having been, in the very earliest human efforts at botanical description, {172} attached to it by the pure Aryan race, watching the strips of rosy satin break from the birch stems, in the Aberfeldys of Imaus.

3. That this tree should have been the only one which "the Aryans, coming as conquerors from the North, were able to recognize in Hindustan,"[45] and should therefore also be "the only one whose name is common to Sanskrit, and to the languages of Europe," delighted me greatly, for two reasons: the first, for its proof that in spite of the development of species, the sweet gleaming of birch stem has never changed its argent and sable for any unchequered heraldry; and the second, that it gave proof of a much more important fact, the keenly accurate observation of Aryan foresters at that early date; for the fact is that the breaking of the thin-beaten silver of the birch trunk is so delicate, and its smoothness so graceful, that until I painted it with care, I was not altogether clear-headed myself about the way in which the chequering was done: nor until Fors today brought me to the house of one of my father's friends at Carshalton, and gave me three birch stems to look at just outside the window, did I perceive it to be a primal question about them, what it is that blanches that dainty dress of theirs, or, antic.i.p.atorily, weaves. What difference is there between the making of the corky excrescence of other {173} trees, and of this almost transparent fine white linen? I perceive that the older it is, within limits, the finer and whiter; h.o.a.ry tissue, instead of h.o.a.ry hair--honouring the tree's aged body; the outer sprays have no silvery light on their youth. Does the membrane thin itself into whiteness merely by stretching, or produce an outer film of new substance?[46]

4. And secondly, this invest.i.ture, why is it transverse to the trunk,--swathing it, as it were, in bands? Above all,--when it breaks,--why does it break round the tree instead of down? All other bark breaks as anything would, naturally, round a swelling rod, but this, as if the stem were growing longer; until, indeed, it reaches farthest heroic old age, when the whiteness pa.s.ses away again, and the rending is like that of other trees, downwards. So that, as it were in a changing language, we have the great botanical fact twice taught us, by this tree of Eden, that the skins of trees differ from the skins of the higher animals in that, for the most part, they won't stretch, and must be worn torn.

So that in fact the most popular arrangement of vegetative adult costume is Irish; a normal invest.i.ture in honourable rags; and decorousness of tattering, as of a banner borne in splendid ruin through storms of war.

5. Now therefore, if we think of it, we have five {174} distinct orders of invest.i.ture for organic creatures; first, mere secretion of mineral substance, chiefly lime, into a hard sh.e.l.l, which, if broken, can only be mended, like china--by sticking it together; secondly, organic substance of armour which grows into its proper shape at once for good and all, and can't be mended at all, if broken, (as of insects); thirdly, organic substance of skin, which stretches, as the creatures grows, by cracking, over a fresh skin which is supplied beneath it, as in bark of trees; fourthly, organic substance of skin cracked symmetrically into plates or scales which can increase all round their edges, and are connected by softer skin, below, as in fish and reptiles, (divided with exquisite l.u.s.tre and flexibility, in feathers of birds); and lastly, true elastic skin, extended in soft unison with the creature's growth,--blus.h.i.+ng with its blood, fading with its fear; breathing with its breath, and guarding its life with sentinel beneficence of pain.

6. It is notable, in this higher and lower range of organic beauty, that the decoration, by pattern and colour, which is almost universal in the protective coverings of the middle ranks of animals, should be reserved in vegetables for the most living part of them, the flower only; and that among animals, few but the malignant and senseless are permitted, in the corrugation of their armour, to resemble the half-dead trunk of the tree, as they float beside it in the tropical river. I must, however, leave the scale patterns of the palms and other inlaid tropical {175} stems for after-examination,--content, at present, with the general idea of the bark of an outlaid tree as the successive acc.u.mulation of the annual protecting film, rent into ravines of slowly increasing depth, and coloured, like the rock, whose stability it begins to emulate, with the grey or gold of clinging lichen and embroidering moss.

{176}

CHAPTER XI.

GENEALOGY.

1. Returning, after more than a year's sorrowful interval, to my Sicilian fields,--not incognisant, now, of some of the darker realms of Proserpina; and with feebler heart, and, it may be, feebler wits, for wandering in her brighter ones,--I find what I had written by way of sequel to the last chapter, somewhat difficult, and extremely tiresome. Not the less, after giving fair notice of the difficulty, and asking due pardon for the tiresomeness, I am minded to let it stand; trusting to end, with it, once for all, investigations of the kind. But in finis.h.i.+ng this first volume of my School Botany, I must try to give the reader some notion of the plan of the book, as it now, during the time for thinking over it which illness left me, has got itself arranged in my mind, within limits of possible execution. And this the rather, because I wish also to state, somewhat more gravely than I have yet done, the grounds on which I venture here to reject many of the received names of plants; and to subst.i.tute others for them, relating to entirely different attributes {177} from those on which their present nomenclature is confusedly edified.

I have already in some measure given the reasons for this change;[47] but I feel that, for the sake of those among my scholars who have laboriously learned the accepted names, I ought now also to explain its method more completely.

2. I call the present system of nomenclature _confusedly_ edified, because it introduces,--without, apparently, any consciousness of the inconsistency, and certainly with no apology for it,--names founded sometimes on the history of plants, sometimes on their qualities, sometimes on their forms, sometimes on their products, and sometimes on their poetical a.s.sociations.

On their history--as 'Gentian' from King Gentius, and Funkia from Dr. Funk.

On their qualities--as 'Scrophularia' from its (quite uncertified) use in scrofula.

On their forms--as the 'Caryophylls' from having petals like husks of nuts.

On their products--as 'Cocos nucifera' from its nuts.

And on their poetical a.s.sociations,--as the Star of Bethlehem from its imagined resemblance to the light of that seen by the Magi.

3. Now, this variety of grounds for nomenclature might patiently, and even with advantage, be permitted, {178} provided the grounds themselves were separately firm, and the inconsistency of method advisedly allowed, and, in each case, justified. If the histories of King Gentius and Dr. Funk are indeed important branches of human knowledge;--if the Scrophulariaceae do indeed cure King's Evil;--if pinks be best described in their likeness to nuts;--and the Star of Bethlehem verily remind us of Christ's Nativity,--by all means let these and other such names be evermore retained. But if Dr.

Funk be not a person in any special manner needing either stellification or florification; if neither herb nor flower can avail, more than the touch of monarchs, against hereditary pain; if it be no better account of a pink to say it is nut-leaved, than of a nut to say it is pink-leaved; and if the modern mind, incurious respecting the journeys of wise men, has already confused, in its Bradshaw's Bible, the station of Bethlehem with that of Bethel,[48] it is certainly time to take some order with the partly false, partly useless, and partly forgotten literature of the Fields; and, before we bow our children's memories to the burden of it, ensure that there shall be matter worth carriage in the load.

4. And farther, in attempting such a change, we must be clear in our own minds whether we wish our nomenclature to tell us something about the plant itself, or only to tell us the place it holds in relation to other plants: as, for instance, in the Herb-Robert, would it be well to {179} christen it, shortly, 'Rob Roy,' because it is pre-eminently red, and so have done with it;--or rather to dwell on its family connections, and call it 'Macgregoraceous'?

5. Before we can wisely decide this point, we must resolve whether our botany is intended mainly to be useful to the vulgar, or satisfactory to the scientific elite. For if we give names characterizing individuals, the circle of plants which any country possesses may be easily made known to the children who live in it: but if we give names founded on the connexion between these and others at the Antipodes, the parish school-master will certainly have double work; and it may be doubted greatly whether the parish school-boy, at the end of the lecture, will have half as many ideas.

6. Nevertheless, when the features of any great order of plants are constant, and, on the whole, represented with great clearness both in cold and warm climates, it may be desirable to express this their citizens.h.i.+p of the world in definite nomenclature. But my own method, so far as. .h.i.therto developed, consists essentially in fastening the thoughts of the pupil on the special character of the plant, in the place where he is likely to see it; and therefore, in expressing the power of its race and order in the wider world, rather by reference to mythological a.s.sociations than to botanical structure.

7. For instance, Plate VII. represents, of its real size, an ordinary spring flower in our English mountain fields. It is an average example,--not one of rare size under rare {180} conditions,--rather smaller than the average, indeed, that I might get it well into my plate. It is one of the flowers whose names I think good to change; but I look carefully through the existing t.i.tles belonging to it and its fellows, that I may keep all I expediently can. I find, in the first place, that Linnaeus called one group of its relations, Ophryds, from Ophrys,--Greek for the eyebrow,--on account of their resemblance to the brow of an animal frowning, or to the overshadowing casque of a helmet. I perceive this to be really a very general aspect of the flower; and therefore, no less than in respect to Linnaeus, I adopt this for the total name of the order, and call them 'Ophrydae,' or, shortly, 'Ophryds.'

8. Secondly: so far as I know these flowers myself, I perceive them to fall practically into three divisions,--one, growing in English meadows and Alpine pastures, and always adding to their beauty; another, growing in all sorts of places, very ugly itself, and adding to the ugliness of its indiscriminated haunts; and a third, growing mostly up in the air, with as little root as possible, and of gracefully fantastic forms, such as this kind of nativity and habitation might presuppose. For the present, I am satisfied to give names to these three groups only. There may be plenty of others which I do not know, and which other people may name, according to their knowledge. But in all these three kinds known to me, I perceive one constant characteristic to be _some_ manner of _distortion_ and I desire that fact,--marking a {181} spiritual (in my sense of the word) character of extreme mystery,--to be the first enforced on the mind of the young learner. It is exhibited to the English child, primarily, in the form of the stalk of each flower, attaching it to the central virga. This stalk is always twisted once and a half round, as if somebody had been trying to wring the blossom off; and the name of the family, in Proserpina, will therefore be 'Contorta'[49] in Latin, and 'Wreathe-wort' in English.

Farther: the beautiful power of the one I have drawn in its spring life, is in the opposition of its dark purple to the primrose in England, and the pale yellow anemone in the Alps. And its individual name will be, therefore, 'Contorta purpurea'--_Purple_ Wreathe-wort.

And in drawing it, I take care to dwell on this strength of its color, and to show thoroughly that it is a _dark_ blossom,[50] before I trouble myself about its minor characters.

9. The second group of this kind of flowers live, as I said, in all sorts of places; but mostly, I think, in disagreeable ones,--torn and irregular ground, under alternations of unwholesome heat and shade, and among swarms of nasty insects. I cannot yet venture on any bold general statement about them, but I think that is mostly their way; and at all events, they themselves are in the {182} habit of dressing in livid and unpleasant colors; and are distinguished from all other flowers by twisting, not only their stalks, but one of their petals, not once and a half only, but two or three times round, and putting it far out at the same time, as a foul jester would put out his tongue: while also the singular power of grotesque mimicry, which, though strong also in the other groups of their race, seems in the others more or less playful, is, in these, definitely degraded, and, in aspect, malicious.

10. Now I find the Latin name 'Satyrium' attached already to one sort of these flowers; and we cannot possibly have a better one for all of them. It is true that, in its first Greek form, Dioscorides attaches it to a white, not a livid, flower; and I dare say there are some white ones of the breed: but, in its full sense, the term is exactly right for the entire group of ugly blossoms of which the characteristic is the spiral curve and protraction of their central petal: and every other form of Satyric ugliness which I find among the Ophryds, whatever its color, will be grouped with them. And I make them central, because this humour runs through the whole order, and is, indeed, their distinguis.h.i.+ng sign.

11. Then the third group, living actually in the air, and only holding fast by, without nouris.h.i.+ng itself from, the ground, rock, or tree-trunk on which it is rooted, may of course most naturally and accurately be called 'Aeria,' as it has long been popularly known in English by the name of Air-plant. {183}

Thus we have one general name for all these creatures, 'Ophryd'; and three family or group names, Contorta, Satyrium, and Aeria,--every one of these t.i.tles containing as much accurate fact about the thing named as I can possibly get packed into their syllables: and I will trouble my young readers with no more divisions of the order. And if their parents, tutors, or governors, after this fair warning, choose to make them learn, instead, the seventy-seven different names with which botanist-heraldries have beautifully enn.o.bled the family,--all I can say is, let them at least begin by learning them themselves. They will be found in due order in pages 1084, 1085 of Loudon's Cyclopaedia.[51]

12. But now, farther: the student will observe that the name of the total order is Greek; while the three family ones are Latin, although the central one is originally Greek also.

I adopt this as far as possible for a law through my whole plant nomenclature.

13. Farther: the terminations of the Latin family names will be, for the most part, of the masculine, {184} feminine, and neuter forms, us, a, um, with these following attached conditions.

(I.) Those terminating in 'us,' though often of feminine words, as the central Arbor, will indicate either real masculine strength (quereus, laurus), or conditions of dominant majesty (cedrus), of stubbornness and enduring force (crataegus), or of peasant-like commonalty and hards.h.i.+p (juncus); softened, as it may sometimes happen, into gentleness and beneficence (thymus). The occasional forms in 'er' and 'il' will have similar power (acer, basil).

(II.) Names with the feminine termination 'a,' if they are real names of girls, will always mean flowers that are perfectly pretty and perfectly good (Lucia, Viola, Margarita, Clarissa). Names terminating in 'a' which are not also accepted names of girls, may sometimes be none the less honourable, (Primula, Campanula,) but for the most part will signify either plants that are only good and worthy in a nursy sort of way, (Salvia,) or that are good without being pretty, (Lavandula,) or pretty without being good, (Kalmia). But no name terminating in 'a' will be attached to a plant that is neither good nor pretty.

(III.) The neuter names terminating in 'um' will always indicate some power either of active or suggestive evil, (Conium, Solanum, Satyrium,) or a relation, more or less definite, to death; but this relation to death may sometimes be n.o.ble, or pathetic,--"which {185} to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven,"--Lilium.

But the leading position of these neuters in the plant's double name must be noticed by students unacquainted with Latin, in order to distinguish them from plural genitives, which will always, of course, be the second word, (Francesca Fontium, Francesca of the Springs.)

14. Names terminating in 'is' and 'e,' if definitely names of women, (Iris, Amaryllis, Alcestis, Daphne,) will always signify flowers of great beauty, and n.o.ble historic a.s.sociation. If not definitely names of women, they will yet indicate some specialty of sensitiveness, or a.s.sociation with legend (Berberis, Clematis). No neuters in 'e' will be admitted.

15. Participial terminations (Impatiens), with neuters in 'en' (Cyclamen), will always be descriptive of some special quality or form,--leaving it indeterminate if good or bad, until explained. It will be manifestly impossible to limit either these neuters, or the feminines in 'is' to Latin forms; but we shall always know by their termination that they cannot be generic names, if we are strict in forming these last on a given method.

16. How little method there is in our present formation of them, I am myself more and more surprised as I consider. A child is shown a rose, and told that he is to call every flower like that, 'Rosaceous';[52] he is next {186} shown a lily, and told that he is to call every flower like that, 'Liliaceous';--so far well; but he is next shown a daisy, and is not at all allowed to call every flower like that, 'Daisaceous,' but he must call it, like the fifth order of architecture, 'Composite'; and being next shown a pink, he is not allowed to call other pinks 'Pinkaceous,' but 'Nut-leafed'; and being next shown a pease-blossom, he is not allowed to call other pease-blossoms 'Peasaceous,' but, in a brilliant burst of botanical imagination, he is incited to call it by two names instead of one, 'b.u.t.terfly-aceous' from its flower, and 'Pod-aceous' from its seed;--the inconsistency of the terms thus enforced upon him being perfected in their inaccuracy, for a daisy is not one whit more composite than Queen of the meadow, or Jura Jacinth;[53] and 'legumen' is not Latin for a pod, but 'siliqua,'--so that no good scholar could remember Virgil's 'siliqua qua.s.sante legumen,' without overthrowing all his Pisan nomenclature.

17. Farther. If we ground our names of the higher orders on the distinctive characters of _form_ in plants, these are so many, and so subtle, that we are at once involved in more investigations than a young learner has ever time to follow successfully, and they must be at all times liable to dislocations and rearrangements on the discovery of any new link in the infinitely entangled {187} chain. But if we found our higher nomenclature at once on historic fact, and relative conditions of climate and character, rather than of form, we may at once distribute our flora into unalterable groups, to which we may add at our pleasure, but which will never need disturbance; far less, reconstruction.

18. For instance,--and to begin,--it is an historical fact that for many centuries the English nation believed that the Founder of its religion, spiritually, by the mouth of the King who spake of all herbs, had likened himself to two flowers,--the Rose of Sharon, and Lily of the Valley. The fact of this belief is one of the most important in the history of England,--that is to say, of the mind or heart of England: and it is connected solemnly with the heart of Italy also, by the closing cantos of the Paradiso.

I think it well therefore that our two first generic, or at least commandant, names heading the out-laid and in-laid divisions of plants, should be of the rose and lily, with such meaning in them as may remind us of this fact in the history of human mind.

It is also historical that the personal appearing of this Master of our religion was spoken of by our chief religious teacher in these terms: "The Grace of G.o.d, that bringeth salvation, hath appeared unto all men." And it is a constant fact that this 'grace' or 'favor' of G.o.d is spoken of as "giving us to eat of the Tree of Life."

19. Now, comparing the botanical facts I have to express, with these historical ones, I find that the rose tribe {188} has been formed among flowers, not in distant and monstrous geologic aeras, but in the human epoch;--that its 'grace' or favor has been in all countries so felt as to cause its acceptance everywhere for the most perfect physical type of womanhood;--and that the characteristic fruit of the tribe is so sweet, that it has become symbolic at once of the subtlest temptation, and the kindest ministry to the earthly pa.s.sion of the human race. "Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love."