It Is Ever Changing, And In The Same Way As You
Walk By The Hedges Day By Day There Is Always Some Fresh Circumstance Of
Nature, The Interest Of Which In A Measure Blots Out The Past.
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. The softer under
surface representing the floor is untouched. The woodbine leaves are
often bored like this, and seem to have patterns traced upon them. There
is no particle of matter so small but that it seems to have a living
thing working at it and resolving it into still more minute atoms;
nothing so insignificant but that upon examination it will be found to be
of the utmost value to something alive. Upon almost every fir branch near
the end there are little fragments like cotton, so thick in places as to
quite hang the boughs with threads; these gossamer-like fragments appear
to be left by some insect, perhaps an aphis; and it is curious to note
how very very busy the little willow-wrens are in the fir boughs. They
are constantly at work there; they sing in the firs in the earliest
spring, they stay there all the summer, and now that the edge of autumn
approaches their tiny beaks are still picking up insects the whole day
long. The insects they devour must be as numerous as the fir needles that
lie inches thick on the ground in the copse.
Across a broad, dry, sandy path, worn firm, some thousands of ants
passing to and fro their nest had left a slight trail. They were hurrying
on in full work, when I drew the top of my walking-stick across their
road, obliterating about an inch of it. In an instant the work of the
nest was stopped, and thousands upon thousands of factory hands were
thrown out of employment. The walking-stick had left two little ridges of
sand like minute parallel earthworks drawn across their highway. Those
that came out of the nest on arriving at the little ridge on their side
immediately stopped, worked their antennae in astonishment, then went up
to the top of it, and seemed to try to look round. After a moment they
ran back and touched those that were coming on to communicate the
intelligence. Every ant that came did exactly the same thing; not one of
them passed the little ridge, but all returned. By-and-by the head of the
column began to spread out and search right and left for the lost track.
They scouted this way and they scouted that, they turned and doubled and
went through every possible evolution, hundreds of them, sometimes a
score at once, yet not one of them attempted to go straight forward,
which would have brought them into their old path. It was scarcely thrice
the length of an ant's body to where their path began again; they could
not see or scent, or in any way find out what was so short a distance in
front of them. The most extraordinary thing was that not one ventured to
explore straight forward; it was as if their world came to an end at that
little ridge, and they were afraid to step into chaos. The same actions
were going on behind the other ridge of sand just opposite, an inch away.
There the column of ants that had been out foraging was met with a like
difficulty, and could not find their way. There, too, hundreds of ants
were exploring right and left in every direction except straight forward,
in a perfect buzz of excitement. Once or twice an ant from either party
happened to mount on the parallel ridges at the same time, and if they
had strained forward and stretched out their antennae they could have
almost touched each other. Yet they seemed quite unconscious of each
other's presence. Unless in a well-worn groove a single ant appears
incapable of running in a straight line. At first their motions searching
about suggested the action of a pack of hounds making a cast; hounds,
however, would have very soon gone forward and so picked up the trail.
If I may make a guess at the cause of this singular confusion, I think I
should attribute it to some peculiarity in the brain of the ant, or else
to some consideration of which we are ignorant, but which weighs with
ants, and not to any absence of the physical senses.
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