We Ga 
381 
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1882 
VIGNETTES FROM NATURE 
Vignettes from Nature. By Grant Allen. (London: 
Chatto and Windus, 1881.) 
ERTAINLY Mr. Grant Allen stands at the head of 
living writers as a popular exponent of the evolution 
theory. Although the subject is one which he has taken 
up a comparatively short time ago, he appears to have 
thoroughly mastered its principles, to have read and 
assimilated all the best works on the subject, and to have 
so imbued himself with its leading ideas that he is able 
to apply it in an intelligent and often original manner to 
every natural object he meets with in his daily walks or 
holiday rambles. To these primary qualifications he 
adds a great power of description, a vivid imagination, 
and a charming style of writing, all of which are displayed 
in every page of his last work. This consists of a series 
of short essays, which originally appeared in the Pad// 
Mall Gazette, each giving a sketch of some single scene 
or natural object, and showing how much interest can be 
given to the most common things by considering them 
from the point of view of evolution. “Sedge and Wood- 
rush’? furnish an opportunity for the explanation of 
degraded types and the large part played by “‘ degenera- 
tion’ in the origin of existing animals and plants. By 
the common “‘Red Campion and White” we are shown 
how, and by what means, species become differentiated ; 
and the subject is further discussed and elucidated in the 
chapter on a “ Bed of Nettles.’? After showing how the 
sting of the nettle has originated, and how it protects 
‘the plant by stinging the noses of herbivorous quadrupeds, 
he goes on to discuss the general form of the nettle in a 
way that is both suggestive and (I think) original. 
“But the sting certainly does not exhaust the whole 
philosophy of the nettle. Look, for example, at the stem 
and leaves. The nettle has found its chance in life, its 
one fitting vacancy, among the ditches and waste places 
by roadsides or near cottages ; and it has laid itself out 
for the circumstances in which it lives. Its near relative, 
the hop, is a twisting climber ; its southern cousins, the 
fig and mulberry, are tall and spreading trees. But the 
nettle has made itself a niche in nature along the bare 
patches which diversify human cultivation ; and it has 
adapted its stem and leaves to the station in life where it 
has pleased Providence to place it. Plants like the dock, 
the burdock, and the rhubarb, which lift their leaves 
straight above the ground, from large subterranean reser- 
voirs of material, have usually big, broad, undivided 
leaves, that overshadow all beneath them, and push 
boldly out on every side to drink in the air and sunlight. 
On the other hand, regular hedgerow plants, like cleavers, 
chervil, herb-Robert, milfoil, and most ferns, which grow 
in the tangled shady undermath of the banks and thickets, 
have usually slender, blade-like, much divided leaves, all 
split up into long narrow pushing segments, because they 
cannot get sunlight and air enough to build up a single 
large, respectable, rounded leaf. 
“The nettle is just half way between these two ex- 
tremes. It does not grow out broad and solitary, like the 
burdock, nor does it creep under the hedges like the little 
inuch-divided wayside weeds ; but it springs up erect in 
tall, thick, luxuriant clumps, growing close together, each 
stem fringed with a considerable number of moderate- 
sized, heart-shaped, toothed-and-pointed leaves. Such 
VOL. Xxv.—-No. 643 
leaves have just room enough to expand, and to extract 
from the air all the carbon they need for their growth, 
without encroaching on one another’s food supply (for it 
must always be remembered that leaves grow out of the 
air, not, as most people fancy, out of the ground), and so 
without the consequent necessity for dividing up into little 
separate narrow segments. Accordingly, this type of leaf 
is very common among all those plants which spring 
up beside the hedgerows in the same erect shrubby 
manner as the nettles. It is almost exactly imitated in 
the dead-nettle and the hemp-nettle, which are plants of 
a totally distinct family, with flowers of the sage and 
rosemary type ; and it is more or less simulated by ten 
or twenty other species of like habit. This peculiarity ot 
external resemblance, under identical circumstances, is 2 
common and a natural one. . . . Whatever the original 
stock, natural selection tends always under like circum- 
stances to produce like results.” 
Then we have the dicecious green flowers described, 
with the curious elasticity and irritability of the stamens, 
which throw out the pollen dust when the wind blows 
the plants about, and thus ensures abundant cross- 
fertilisation. 
In the next chapter, “ Loosestrife and Pimpernel,” we 
have an excellent discussion on the close relationship cf 
the wood-loosestrife or yellow-pimpernel (Lyszmachic 
nemorum) to the true pimpernel (Anagaliis vulgaris), 
although placed by botanists in distinct genera. Such 
remarks as these are very important, calling attention to 
the fact that the technical characters of botanists, even 
when drawn from the structure of the fruit, may be really 
of recent origin, and may not be so important as more 
superficial resemblances usually treated as of less sys- 
tematic value. In another article on “A B’g Fossil 
Bone” a popular misconception as to the generally large 
size of extinct animals is very well corrected. Everywhere 
we seem to find in fossil forms a bigger animal of each 
kind than any now existing. Here we have an enormous 
Irish elk, there an immense extinct sloth, a gigantic 
armadillo, or a turtle ten times as big as the greatest 
living member of the tortoise group. But it is apt to be 
forgotten that the huge Saurians were secondary animals, 
while the dinotherium was tertiary, the mammoth qua- 
ternary, and the moa as well as the epyorais almost 
modern. It is forgotten that the age of the great 
reptiles was nearly over before that of the great mammals 
set in. It is forgotten that the glyptodon lived in South 
America, while the big elk lived in Ireland ; and by pic- 
turing a world in which all the great extinct animals were 
grouped together as they see them in a geological museum, 
people get a distorted picture which really reverses the 
actual facts as to the relative size of the animals in the 
past and the present. For (Mr. Allen remarks)— 
“‘ As a matter of fact it seems probable that our actual 
fauna and flora are on the whole not only quite as big as 
any previous ones, but even a great deal bigger. If we 
take single instances, no known extinct animal was as 
large as some of our modern whales; if we look at the 
ensemble of our existing species, no known period com- 
prised so many large forms as we can show at the present 
day in our three or four great cetaceans, our two elephants, 
our rhinoceroses, our bisons, our giraffe, our walrus, and 
our horses. These would probably form a total assem- 
blage of larger average size than any previous epoch could 
produce. Similarly in almost every special class, we could 
apparently show larger species at the present day than 
any which we know to have existed in fossil forms. Our 
s 
