114 



DISCOVERY 



"getting the wind up " means, and how it came to 

 mean it. Aeronautics, big-game hunting, and even 

 irascibility were invoked as inspiring the metaphor, 

 and had their several partisans. There is another 

 phrase — also popular during the war — whose origin is 

 equall}? mysterious, though its meaning is quite clear 

 — and that is "Money for jam." We imply — if we 

 are undignified enough to employ the phrase — that 

 we are gaining an advantage at the expenditure of 

 quite disproportionate effort. We hazard the sug- 

 gestion — without much confidence — that the phrase 

 had its origin in a suspicion that Army jam rations 

 were composed of materials which rendered any change 

 — however small — a source of exceeding profit. Be 

 that as it may, " Money for jam " is a most alluring 

 prospect for mankind. It drives men to make furni- 

 ture of soap-boxes, to buy useless but ponderous 

 tomes at second-hand bookstalls, for the sole reason 

 that they are in the fourpenny box ; it is the root 

 instinct that has inspired and nurtured the noble 

 profession of bookmaking. There is a fascination in 

 makmg the apparently valueless a source of profit 

 and wealth — in making the desert blossom like a rose. 



And the desert is quite ready to blossom, if rightly 

 and intelligently handled. There was published dur- 

 ing the war, when the question of home-grown foods 

 became pressing, a little work which endeavoured to 

 enumerate, in a lamentably small space, all native 

 articles of diet. They included the thighs of grass- 

 hoppers and the young of the rat ; the eggs of the 

 sparrow and the leaves of the dandelion ; the cater- 

 pillars of the white butterfly . and hedgehogs. Not, 

 perhaps, a feast worthy of Lucullus, but at least a 

 novel menu — something bej'ond the Delicatessen 

 shops — might be produced by the undaunted epicure 

 at the expense of an afternoon in the meadows, and 

 perhaps a few hours in the rat-nurseries by the London 

 docks. But when all is said, and the last grasshopper's 

 thighs deliciously eaten, it must be admitted that our 

 native land is not a Swiss Family Robinson island ; 

 it has its limitations. WTiUe hunting on Epsom 

 Downs for the larvae of a rare moth, an entomologist 

 was stopped by a gipsy. " WTiat are you looking 

 for ? " asked the gipsy. " Grubs," said the ento- 

 mologist, coming down to his level. " Grub ! " said 

 the gipsy. " You won't get much grub that way." 

 And gipsies, says George Borrow — and doubtless he 

 is right — are a knowledgable crowd. That is not the 

 road to " Money for jam." 



***** 



But there is another. Wide stretches of these 

 islands are barren — beautiful, but barren. The bog- 

 country of the centre and west of Ireland is a source 



of peat, it is true, but of little else. There are 400 

 square miles of sandy soU in Suffolk and Norfolk alone 

 which are useless, as they stand, to the agriculturist, 

 and grow only heather and bracken. There are sand- 

 dunes by many a sea-coast ; wide stretches of mud 

 or shingle ; salt-marshes where only sea birds can take 

 delight, and land covered with refuse from pit -heads 

 where nothing can. Are we to leave these waste 

 lands uncultivated for all time ? Can nothing be 

 done to make them yield pasture, timber, or crops ? 

 This question is occupying the attention of a great 

 many workers. For example, sandy wastes have been 

 made productive by growing lupins on them and so 

 rendering them more capable of holding water, and 

 allowing the crop to be dug into the soil as a manure. 

 Holland, of course, has long known how to win wealth 

 from a poor and barren land ; the bulb gardens of 

 the Low Countries are famous the world over. The 

 drainage of the fen-country of Cambridgeshire is one 

 notable success for English methods, even though 

 much yet remains possible in those wide and lonely 

 stretches. Pit-head refuse wUl often permit of the 

 growth of trees useful locally for pit-props ; shingle 

 beaches. Professor F. W. Oliver believes, might be 

 made productive by growing "nurse-plants" there, 

 which would enrich the soil and enable other plants 

 to be grown later. Research on these questions is 

 being actively pursued both at Cambridge and Roth- 

 amsted, and the Agricultural Department at Leeds 

 University is supervising work in Yorkshire on the 

 improvement of poor pasture-land. A most interest- 

 ing discussion of these subjects is given in a little 

 volume entitled The Exploitation of Plants,'^ which 

 offers several suggestions for the utilisation of national 

 resources yet neglected. 



Animals and their intelligence, insects and their 

 brains, man and his mere automatism — these are 

 subjects which recur perenially as year by year another 

 generation awakes to their importance and difficulties. 

 It is notable that those who believe most emphatically 

 that there are mental processes in animals comparable 

 to those in man, are the men who, like the late W. H. 

 Hudson and the " inimitable observer " J. H. Fabre, 

 the insect's Homer, have spent long days in silent and 

 sympathetic observation of the doings of dumb crea- 

 tures in their natural surroundings. Those who look 

 upon them as complicated machines have oftenest 

 examined them with complicated machinery. We 

 cannot decide between them ; we can but observe the 

 extreme views. The primitive one-celled organism 

 in a drop of ditch water appears to absorb suitable 

 food and to discard the indigestible residues, and 

 ' J. M. Dent & Sons, 2s. 6d. 



