This
Morning We Found A Bramble Leaf, Something About Which Has For The Moment
Put The Record Of Months Aside.
This bramble leaf was marked with a grey
streak, which coiled and turned and ran along beside the midrib, forming
a sort of thoughtless design, a design without an idea.
The Greek fret
seems to our eyes in its regularity and its repetition to have a human
thought in it. The coils and turns upon this leaf, like many other
markings of nature, form a designless design, the idea of which is not
traceable back to a mind. They are the work of a leaf-boring larva which
has eaten its way between the two skins of the leaf, much like boring a
tunnel between the two surfaces of a sheet of paper. If you take a needle
you can insert the point in the burrow and pass it along wherever the
bore is straight, so that the needle lies between the to sides of the
leaf. Off-hand, if any one were asked if it were possible to split a
leaf, he would say no. This little creature, however, has worked along
inside it, and lived there. The upper surface of the leaf is a darker
green, and seems to the touch of firmer texture than the lower; there are
no marks on the under surface, which does not seem touched, so that what
the creature has really done is to split one surface. He has eaten along
underneath it, raising it no doubt a little by the thickness of his body,
as if you crept between the carpet and the floor.
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