26 



KNO^A^LEDGE - 



[December 1, 1886. 



or receptacle. With the true raspberries, as everybody 

 knows, the fruit comes oft' entire like a thimble, leaving a 

 hollow in the centre where the hull used to be. In the 

 true blackberries, on the other hand, the fruit adheres tightly 

 to the hull, which has to be broken off" and eaten with it. 

 Of these two types, the cloudberry belongs to the first or 

 raspberry group, as do also our common red raspberries, the 

 American black raspberry, the purple-flowering raspberry, 

 and the Nutka bramble of our shrubberies and gardens. 

 The English blackberries and dewberries, on the other hand, 

 as well as the numerous American black and red black- 

 bsrries, belong rather to the second or true bramble 

 class. 



The brambles must already have existed abundantly in 

 the world long before the Glacial Epoch, because we find 

 several representatives of both groups in Europe and 

 America, some of them nearly identical on both sides of the 

 Atlantic, and others widely difl'erent in character and aspect. 

 They were then already bushy plants, armed for the most 

 part witli stout prickles, and divided into many of their 

 existing species, though a few have since diverged inde- 

 pendently, such as the wild red raspberry of America, 

 which, though closely resembling our European type, is now 

 adjudged to be specifically distinct in certain minor technical 

 peculiarities. Time has sufliced to work the change under 

 diverse conditions. But there could be as yet no cloud- 

 bei-ries, because there were as yet none of the Arctic or 

 snowy-mountain conditions under which alone the cloud- 

 berry flourishes. The herbaceous brambles are all northern 

 and cold-weather species, and they could not possibly have 

 come into existence before the Glacial Epoch made the 

 proper habitats of such species possible. If you look into 

 such a book as Professor Babingtou's " Manual of British 

 Botany" (written without regard to evolutionary principles) 

 you will find the main division of the brambles made into — 

 .V. Shrubby, and B. Herbaceous brambles; the raspberry 

 and blackberry being classed under the first, and the cloud- 

 berry and stone-bramble under the second heading. But a 

 moment's consideration will show you that this is not a 

 point of classificatory or hereditary importance at all : it is 

 a mere point of adaptive modification. The real division of 

 the ancestral type, long before the Glacial Epoch, during 

 the warm Pliocene or Miocene times, was the one I have 

 given above, into " thimbleberries " and " stickberries ; " 

 and the modern Arctic cloudberries, and so forth, are mere 

 stunted and herbaceous developments of the original rasp- 

 berry or thimbleberry group. Any one who will take the 

 trouble to look at the distribution of the species at the 

 present day will see that this must be so. 



We have in England a plant which shows in a less degree 

 the peculiar dwarfing eSect of the Glacial Epoch on the 

 bramble type ; I mean the little stone-bramble of the 

 northern shires, whose creeping rootstock sends out a few 

 unobtrusive runners and almost herbaceous stems, which 

 rise, however, far higher than those of the cloudberry, often 

 to OS much as a foot from the ground. These stems are 

 slender and downy, and armed with a few soft prickles, the 

 last dwindling abortive representatives of the brambly hooks 

 of our hedge blackberry. Now the stone-bramble is clearly 

 a dwarfed form, which has felt the eflect of the northern 

 winter, but has been less deeply impressed by its dwindling 

 effects than the cloudberry itself. It is, in fact, a somewhat 

 more southern though upland type, difl'nsed over all the 

 mountain regions of Europe and Central Asia, and not by 

 any means so distinctly circumpolar as the more decidedly 

 herbaceous forms. Similarly, in America they have a little 

 plant, the dwarf raspberry, which I found abundantly among 

 the valleys of the White Mountain range, whose stems are 

 annual, low, herbaceous, and devoid of prickles, but with 



three leaflets to each stalk, instead of a simple leaf like the 

 cloudberry's, and with a blossom more like that of the garden 

 raspberry. This intermediate form descends as far south as 

 Penns3dvania, and has not felt the glacial dwarfing nearly 

 so much as the far northern species. 



For fear of misapprehension, I ought distinctly to add 

 that I do not consider any of these half-herbaceous rasp- 

 berries as really halfway houses between the cloudberry 

 and its original Pliocene ancestor. They are rather inde- 

 pendent species, which have undergone to a less extent the 

 same soit of dwarfing from the same cold-weather causes. 

 Just in like manner the Glacial Epoch developed the tiny 

 northern herbaceous willow out of the tree-like willows of 

 Pliocene times ; and it turned the birch into that queer 

 little, stunted, span-high form which we still find in Arctic 

 climates, and whose relics occur in the glacial leaf-beds. 

 The immediate ancestor of the cloudberry, indeed, must 

 have been a bushy raspberry answering closely in type to 

 the Nutka bramble, which, though shrubby, has no prickles, 

 and agrees with the cloudberry in its simple leaves and 

 large white flowers, as well as in the broad flat form of its 

 depressed fruit. Indeed, the cloudberry still bears on its 

 very face one mark of having ultimately descended from 

 such an ancestor, because, though it now produces only two 

 or three leaves on each stem, the lease of the stem is 

 covered with a mass of empty stipules (or winged leaf- 

 stalks, to talk popularly), which recall the memory of a 

 time when the stem was much taller than now, and 

 produced an immense number of leaves. The botanical 

 reader will know what I mean when I say that the 

 internodes between these stipules remain undeveloped in 

 consequence of the great dwarfing of the stem and sup- 

 pression of the accompanying leaves. The stipules them- 

 selves, in short, are the outward and visible sign of the 

 derivation of the cloudberry from a once much larger and 

 taller bramble. 



The Arctic raspberry, on the other hand, said (though no 

 doubt erroneously) to have been gathered on the Isle of 

 Mull, and common in high latitudes in Europe, is a dwarfed 

 herbaceous descendant of a pink-flowered species with three 

 leaflets to each leaf, akin in all probability to the dwai-f 

 raspberry of the Northern States. In short, when the 

 Glacial Epoch came on, it reduced to Aictic scrubbiness all 

 the plants that could accommodate themselves to the altered 

 circumstances ; and hence the dwarf herbaceous habit is 

 really no test of descent or relationship at all, but a mere 

 result of the chilly conditions under which the species now 

 live. 



One word as to the occurrence of tlie cloudberi-y on the 

 summit of Mount Washington at the present day. During 

 the period of the greatest glacial extension this little plant, 

 with hundreds of other Arctic species, w-as driven down 

 far into the central lowlands of America, where they all 

 flourished together until the ice began to retreat again. 

 When the glacial sheet retired northward, however, the 

 Arctic plants retired with it; but a few of them were left, 

 above the limit of trees, on the chilly tops of the White 

 Mountains. That is almost the only station for the cloud- 

 berry in the United States ; but in the extreme north- — at 

 Lubeck, in Maine — it reappears upon the sea-coast, and 

 thence it extends through frozen Nova Scotia, and still 

 moi-e frozen Labrador, till it i-eaches at length the Arctic 

 circle. Like a living fossil, it recalls to us still on these 

 wind-swept New Hampshire heights the long secular winter 

 of the glacial period. 



