Sept. 28, 1883.] 



KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



193 



MAGAZINE OF SqENCE 



PLAINLT:VyORDED -£XACTLYDESCRIB£D 



LONDON: FRIDAY, SEPT. 28, 1883. 



Contents of No. 100. 



PAGE 



A Naturalist's Year. Blackberries 

 are Ripe. By Grant AUen 193 



The Chemistry of Cookery. SIX. 

 By W. Matt"ieu WiUiams 194 



The Antiquity of Man, By W. Pen- 

 gelly 193 



The Sun's Distance. By Professor 

 E.S. Ball, LL.D 197 



The Morality of Happiness. IV. — 

 Right and Wrong. By Thomas 

 Foster 199 



Vast Sun Spots. (lUus.) 201 



ByW. 



Chemistry of the Cereals. 



Jaso, F.C.S 



Poker Principles 203 



The Philosophy of Mathematics. 



Part I. By Professor A. Cayley 201 



Commas and Colons 205 



The Face of the Sky. ByF.R.A.S. 205 



Editorial Gossip 203 



Correspondence ; High - Wheeled 



Tricycles v. Low Wheels — The 



" Sun and Planet " Bicycle, &c... 806 

 Our Chess Coliinm 208 



A NATURALIST'S YEAR. 



By Grant Allen. 

 BLACKBEEEIES AEE RIPE. 



IN all the hedgerows and on all the commons, now, 

 the village children are eagerly filling crocks and 

 baskets with the one great fruit of the year to them, 

 poor little souls, the common wild blackberries. There 

 is no bush more familiar in overgrown spots in England 

 than the bramble, and yet there are few others the story 

 of whose evolution is more interesting than that of this 

 universally distributed British shrub. We can trace the 

 entire history of the blackberry through its various grada- 

 tions almost without transgressing beyond the limits of 

 our own little native flora. The bramble kind are a 

 special oll'shoot of the rose family, distinguished chiefly by 

 their peculiar granulated berries, each of which consists 

 of several tiny one seeded, succulent fruitlets, united 

 round the common receptacle into a single compound 

 fruit. The origin of the race from the original central 

 rosaceous stock, represented by the cinquefoil and other 

 potentillas, is so clear and oVjvioua that it well repays a 

 few minutes' careful attention. 



In their simplest existing forms, the rosaceous plants 

 are low perennial herbs, with small yellow flowers, and 

 tiny dry nut-like seeds, crowded together on a large flat or 

 conical reccjitacle. This is the type familiar to all of us 

 in the English cinquefoils, silverweeds, and tormentils ; and 

 from some such form, the whole of the widely varj'ing rose 

 family lias slowly diverged in one direction or another. 

 But it is not often that we can trace the steps of the 

 divergence among surviving plants so clearly as in the case 

 of tlu! British blackberries. The lowest existing members 

 of th(! blackberry genus are small creeping herbs, of simple 

 habit, hardly diU'ering at all from the potentillas except 

 in the peculiar character of their granulated fruit. 

 Of tlicse very primitive kinds, the cloudberry of 

 Northern Europe may be taken as an excel- 

 lent example. It is a little unol)trusive plant, 

 growing abundantly in the turfy bogs and tundras 

 of Scandinavia, Russia, and Siberia, and still found in 

 quantities in Scotland, though rare in Northern England 

 and the Welsli hills. Like many other early forms, in 



fact, the cloudberry has now been stranded in Arctic or 

 Alpine situations, while both it and its relatives have been 

 driven entirely from more favoured southern climates by 

 its own more advanced cousins, the raspberry, the black- 

 berry, and the dewberry. The stem bears no prickles, and 

 the leaves are simple and rounded in outline, or at most 

 slightly lobed, instead of being deeply di\-ided into 

 separate leaflets, as in all the more advanced bramble 

 types. Its flowers are large, as is often the case 

 with Arctic blossoms, so as to attract the eyes of the 

 rare noi'thern butterflies or moths ; and in this respect the 

 cloudberry is just abreast of some higher potentillas, like 

 the barren strawberry and the true strawberry, which have 

 also progressed from yellow to white petals: while it is 

 ahead of some other rather more developed members of its 

 own genus, which, though in most respects superior to it, 

 have not yet got beyond the primitive stage of yellow 

 flowers. But it is the possession of the peculiar berry 

 which at once marks off the cloudberry from the potentilla 

 group, and points at its true place as an early embodiment 

 of the blackberry type. This berry has been formed from 

 the numerous hard dry carpels or nutlets of the potentillas 

 through the selective agency of the northern birds, in 

 whose scanty diet they form as important a part as 

 they do in the usual stores of Arctic travellers. The outer 

 coat of each little nut has grown soft and succulent, and 

 has at the same time acquired a bright orange-red colour, 

 to attract the attention of the friendly birds by whose aid 

 its seeds are dispersed. The device is exactly analogous to 

 that adopted unconsciously by the strawberry, only that 

 in the strawberry it is the receptacle that becomes sweet 

 and brightly-coloured, while the individual " seeds " or car- 

 pels (really small nuts) remain hard and unobtrusive : 

 whereas in the cloudberry the receptacle is inconspicuous 

 and dry, while the outer coat of the carpels has become 

 succulent and ruddy. The mulberry (a tree belonging to a 

 widely diflerent family — that of the figs and nettles) has 

 a granulated fruit even closer in some respects to that of 

 the bramble : but each granule of the mulberry is produced 

 from the carpels of a separate flower, while in the black- 

 berry the whole set of carpels belong to a single V>lossom. 



There are other little herbaceous bramble kinds besides 

 the cloudberry, such as the pretty little Ruhus arciicus, a 

 very northern form, whose flowers have become pink, while 

 its leaves are divided into three leaflets, like those of the 

 strawberry ; but these are of less importance in the 

 genealogical order than our own British stone-bramble, a 

 mountain plant of central and northern Europe, found 

 pretty frequently in Scotland, in Yorkshire, and in the 

 Welsh hills. In this ugly but interesting little plant, the 

 buried rootstock sends up short greenish stems, very 

 slightly armed with the first beginnings of prickles in the 

 shape of small swollen and pointed projections. Some- 

 times, indeed, these rudimentary defences are altogether 

 wanting ; at other times they as.sume the form of fairly 

 developed sharp spines. This is just what one would 

 expect from the nature of the spots which the stone- 

 bramble inhabits : a low, spreading herb, like the cloud- 

 berry, growing in broad northern bogs and tundras, has 

 little need of protection against browsing herbivores ; but 

 comparatively tall and juicy stems, like those of the stone- 

 brambles, growing in open woods or on broken mountain 

 sides in the great backbone ridges of Europe and 

 Asia, would soon get eaten down entirely by 

 chamois, sheep, or other wild and domesticated ru- 

 minants, unless they were well protected by thorns or 

 prickles from their herbivorous foes. How quickly the 

 weeding action of the animals can produce the survival of 

 protected specimens only is well seen on all the suburban 



