20 



• KNOWLEDGE • 



[Jan. 12, 1883 



animato arising from suporficinl analogies is inborn in the 

 savage, is illustrat<'d all tlicworkl over. The Nortli American 

 Indians prefer a hook that has caught a big fish to the 

 handful of hooks that have never heen tried, and they 

 never lay two nets together, lest they should he jealous of 

 each other. The Bushmen thought tliat the traveller 

 Chapman's big waggon was the mother of liis smaller ones ; 

 and the natives of Tahiti sowed in the ground some iron 

 nails given them by Captain Cook, expecting to obtain 

 young ones. When that ill-fated discoverer's ship was 

 sighted by the New Zealanders, they thought it was 

 a whale with wings. The king of the Coussa Kaffirs, 

 having broken oft" a piece of the anchor of a stranded ship, 

 Boon afterwards died, upon which all the Kaffirs made a 

 point of saluting the anchor very respectfully whenever 

 they went near it, regarding it as a vindictive being. But, 

 perhaps, one of the most striking and amusing illustrations 

 is that quoted by Sir John Lubbock from the " Smithsonian 

 Reports," concerning an Indian who had been sent by a 

 missionary to a colleague with four loaves of bread, accom- 

 panied by a letter stating their number. The Indian ate 

 some of the bread, and his theft was, of course, found out. 

 He was sent on a second errand with a similar liatch of 

 bread and a letter, and repeated the theft, but took the 

 precaution to hide the letter under a stone while he was 

 eating the loaves, so that it might not see him ! 



As the individual is a type of the race, so in the child's 

 nature we find analogy of the mental attitude of the 

 savage ready to hand. To the child everything is alive. 

 With -what timidity and wonder he first touches a watch, 

 with its moving hands and clicking works ; w-itli what 

 genuine anger he beats the door against which he has 

 knocked his head, whips the rocking-horse that has flung 

 him, then kisses and strokes it the next moment in token of 

 forgiveness and affection. Even among civilised adults, as 

 Mr. Grote remarks, " the force of momentary passion 

 will often suffice to supersede the acquired habit, and an 

 intelligent man may be impelled in a moment of 

 agonising pain to kick or beat the lifeless object from 

 ■which he has suffered." The mental condition which 

 causes the wild native of Brazil to bite the stone he 

 stumbled over, may, as Dr. Tylor has pointed out in his 

 invaluable work on " Primitive Culture," be traced along 

 the course of history, not merely in impulsive habit, but 

 in formally enacted law. If among barbarous peoples we 

 find, for example, the relatives of a man killed by a fall 

 from a tree taking their revenge by cutting the tree down 

 and scattering it in chips, we find a continuity of idea in 

 the action of the court of justice held at the Prytaneum 

 in Athens to try any inanimate object, 'such as an axe, or 

 a piece of wood, or stone, which had caused the death of 

 any one without proved human agency, and which, if 

 condemned, was cast in solemn form beyond the border. 

 "The spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the 

 old English law, repealed only in the present reign, 

 whereby not only a beast that kills a' man, but a cart- 

 wheel that runs over him, or a tree that falls on him and 

 kills him, is deodand, or given to God, if., forfeited and 

 sold for the poor." Among ancient legal proceedings in 

 France we read of animals condemned to the gaUows for 

 the crime of murder, and of swarms of caterpillars which 

 infected certain districts being admonished to take them- 

 selves oft" within a given number of days on pain of being 

 declared accursed and excommunicated. When the New 

 Zealander swallows his dead enemy's eye that he may see 

 further, or gives his child pebbles to make it stony and 

 pitiless of heart ; when the Abipone eats tiger's flesh to 

 increase his courage, such confusion in the existence of 

 transferable qualities as these acts imply, has its survivals 



in the old wives' notion that the eye-bright flower, which 

 resembles the eye, is good for diseases of that organ, in 

 the medical remedy for curing a sword-wound by nursing 

 the weapon that caused it, and in the old adage, "take a 

 hair of the dog that bit you " — as the Scandinavian Edda 

 says, " Dogs' hairs heal dogs' bites." 



A NATURALIST'S YEAR. 



By Grant Allen. 

 IV.— WINTER HELIOTEOPE. 



THERE are few flowers out in the garden now, except 

 two or three of the very hardiest species ; but still our 

 English year is never quite destitute of blossoms, and we 

 ha%*e with us, even at this, its darkest moment, the Christ- 

 mas roses, the last lingering chrjsanthemums, and the 

 beautiful purple winter heliotrope. Here is a sprig of that 

 sweet-scented December plant, belonging to a bit which has 

 run wild from the garden into the shadow of the wood en the 

 southerly hillside. Winter heliotrope is not an English, or 

 even a fully naturalised, flower, but it grows readily in 

 sheltered situations in the south, and it often establishes 

 itself for a time, by means of its long underground runners, 

 near places where it has once been planted. Though an 

 alien on our shores, however, it very closely resembles our 

 own British butterbur er purple coltsfoot, from which it 

 chiefly dift"ers in its delicious perfume, in its more solitary 

 flowers, and in its singular habit of blossoming during the 

 very coldest months of winter. 



By family, -^ur heliotrope is a composite, one of the same 

 great tribe as the daisies, the sunflowers, the thistles, and 

 the dandelions. Perhaps, too, I ought to add that it is in 

 no way related to the real heliotropes, which it resembles 

 only in name and in the peculiar nature of its scent ; for 

 the real heliotropes are borage-worts by family, closely 

 lelated to our own familiar blue forget-me-nots. But to 

 tell you that a flower is a composite is not telling you very 

 much ; for there are many thousand species of composites 

 in the world, all agreeing in their main structural features, 

 but all diff'ering "infinitely in shape, colour, habit, and 

 general aspect. That is to say, in other words, the com- 

 posite family is a very successful one, which has not only 

 held its own against allcomers, but has also split up into 

 numberless minor branches, all competing against one 

 another, and all adding certain special advantages of their 

 own to the common ad\antages possessed by the entire 

 race. These common advantages most people know well 

 in the little English daisy, which, as we have all oliserved, 

 has its flowers crowded into a single compact head, and 

 surrounded by a group of bracts or involucre, which protect 

 its united bells in the same way as the calyx of most other 

 species protects the single blossoms. 



Amongst the infinity of separate fomis, however, into 

 which the family of composites has split up, there are 

 some eight or ten great groups in which relationship can 

 be pretty easily traced ; and these again fall into three 

 rough and larger groups, whose characteristics can be 

 readily noted, even by an unbotanical eye. The first is 

 that of the thistles, in which all the florets of each head 

 alike are similar and bell-shaped : the second is that of the 

 daisies, in most of which the inner florets of each head are 

 bell-shaped, while the outer ones arc flattened out into large 

 and conspicuous rays ; the third is that of the dandelions, 

 in which all the florets alike, central or external, have been 

 flattened out into rays like the outer florets of the daisy. 

 Clearly, in general genealogical arrangement, the three 



