William Dickey Gunning

“ The Fall will have cut back, not with the dip, but nearly at right angles across it. And by the present rate of recession it must continue its work of excavation for 80,000 years before the shale will disappear under the bed of the river and the limestone form the entire precipice. Then the same fate will overtake this greater Fall which, ages before, awaited the other. All this on the assumption that Nature is to go on selecting her own channels and seeking her own ends.
But man is, here, greater as a mere dynamic than any other force acting on the globe. Already Niagara has felt his power. ”

“ Well, if plants depend so much on insects, insects must have some way of knowing where they are. As an optical instrument, the eye of an insect is rather imperfect, but it is not color-blind. A butterfly may not be sensitive to the harmonies of color, but it certainly knows a colored object from an object not colored. We need more observations before we can safely say that insects apprehend the different shades of color, and prefer one shade to another; but, if any one will watch bees on a bed of hyacinths, he will see that a particular bee is apt to confine itself to a particular color. ”

“ From symmetry to asymmetry, from a bivalve to a univalve, Nature has moved, closing a cycle of evolution in the snail; from asymmetry back to symmetry, from a shell-bearer to a non-shell-bearer, she is moving in the sea-slugs. In this retrogression, Aplysia has shared the least. It retains the largest shell-vestige; it has the most perfect liver; its gills cover the mantle. Eolis has been carried back the farthest. In this retrogressive movement we may find the rationale of Aplysia's many stomachs, and Eolis's branching stomach and hepatic cells. ”

“ Early in the acorn's life one of the six ovules gets the start of its neighbors and takes to itself all the nutriment. It grows too large for its chamber, and breaks the partition-walls. It grows to the measure of all the chambers, fills them, and pushes its shriveled brethren up against the shell-wall where you see them, five little starved-out things which once were possible oaks! ”

“ If a tourist will stand on the New Suspension Bridge and cast his eye along these ancient banks, his first impression will be that the Niagara which flowed against them was vastly greater than the river which flows now nearly 200 feet below him. But, if his eye will follow the Canadian terrace above the Horseshoe, he will see it falling lower and lower, till, at the head of the Rapids, it merges into the present bank. From this point upward the river is contained within low banks, and bounded by a plain whose monotony is not broken by a hill or terrace. ”

“ Before it was broken through and eroded, it formed a barrier a few feet higher than the surface of Lake Michigan. Then Niagara was not, and the upper lakes sought the ocean through a great river, sections of whose channel, as we have seen, can still be traced from Chicago to the Illinois.
We have lingered long in the past. What of the future? The intelligent tourist who stands by the great cataract cannot allow the beauty, the grandeur, the vast magnificence of the scene, to bear down his imagination and bind up all his powers in the present. ”

“ The salvia with small corolla-tube, not securing fertilization, stands but little chance of surviving. The flower with large tube invites the bee, is fertilized, and ripens seed. "Natural selection" is going on under our very eyes. Now, if, in "the struggle for existence," a larger race of bumble-bees should appear, the salvia must either vary with the varying insect, or die out. And we have no right to assume that the body of an insect is a fixed bulk or structure any more than that the "instinct" or intelligence is fixed and invariable. ”

“ The only insect known to have come down to our times from times so remote as the Cretaceous, unchanged or changed but little, is the tiger-beetle of our sea and lake shores, and the uplands of Colorado. Moreover, an insect at rest is not conditioned as an insect in the air. Let it forsake little by little its aërial life, and rest longer and longer on other bodies. In time it becomes a parasite. ”

“ Pollen and stigma, so close together, are separated by the blade of the stamen. But for insects which, attracted by the color, light, and search the flower for its nectar, and push, now against an anther and now against a stigma, the iris could never set a seed.
Flowers, as Dr. Gray has said, seem to be made on the principle, "how not to do it." By traps, and pits, and springs, insects are made to do by indirection what it would seem could be better done directly by the flower itself. For many flowers the service can be rendered as well by one nectar-loving insect as another. ”

“ But if these aborted ovules are reminiscences of an earlier age, and an acorn less differentiated from the general type of the ovary, the oak becomes intelligible. And in this light of evolution all aborted organs, all rudimental organs, all floral eccentricities, become intelligible. Botany itself ceases to be a toy, and commands the attention of such imperial minds as those of Spencer and Mill. Her boundaries are enlarged. The plant does not stand apart, the result of a single antecedent. It represents the action of countless forces through countless ages. ”

“ Let the edges of the mantle not unite at all, we shall have a mollusk something like the oyster.
Remove the shell, and an oyster lies before you in irregular, ragged outline. An opening at the sharper end, which lies near the beak of the shell, is the mouth. Around the mouth are four leaf-like bodies, which hang in pairs. The heart is an advance on that of Salpa, not in structure but in behavior. It has settled down into regular work, the auricle always an auricle, and the ventricle always a ventricle. The liver is a decided advance on that of Eolis, although not yet a well-defined gland. ”

“ But we can account for the prevalence of pleasing colors and odors without falling back on the law of chances. Very low down in organic Nature is the sense of beauty. A bright color is bright to the eye of a bee as well as to our own. In the course of time those odors and that display of color most pleasing to the senses would, by natural selection, become prevalent and hereditary. ”

“ If, in the main, the higher has followed the lower, within this cycle of progression the struggle for life would involve another cycle of retrogression. As the savage in presence of civilization often sinks to lower savagery, so a species, outstripped in the race of life, and left hopelessly behind, degenerates, and finally dies. ”

“ He looks and listens, and, while he stands overpowered by the falling torrent and rising spray, and thunderous pounding of torrent on fallen torrent, his imagination breaks the spell, and his thoughts wander away into the past and the yet to be. ”

“ If a bad picture does not offend the taste, a good one cannot gratify it. There lies on our table a magazine printed in colored inks, an effort, the publisher tells us, to supplant the old monotony of black and white, and to minister to our love of color. ”

“ It is determined by many factors, inner and outer, and, as Spencer has shown, "the coöperation of inner and outer factors works changes until an equilibrium is reached between the organism and its environment."
On the deep-sea bottom the environing actions remain constant age after age, and we find that in the abyssal world a number of species have remained constant since the Cretaceous epoch. On the surface of the sea and on the beach, the conditions of life have not been constant, and surface and littoral species have been more subject to change. The air is more fickle than the sea. ”

“ The environment being more stable, the opposing actions within are reduced, and the organism lapses into a simpler form. In the insect world we should find the largest number of retrograded species, and so we do. Fleas, bugs, the dream of which sends a shudder through our sleep, creepers in the hair, burrowers in the flesh, form a descending, series, each order carrying with it, in the form of vestiges, reminiscences of a higher state when, as winged insects, its ancestors lived in the open air.
Retrogression of this kind has affected higher orders. ”

“ If he would explain why certain flowers are not colored at all, and how it has come about that other flowers are colored, some in chromatic harmony, and others not, he must look to the flowers themselves, and to their servants the insects. Every one knows that the pollen must find its way from the anther to the stigma, else the flower, lacking impregnation, can set no seed. For many trees, and for grasses generally, the office of transporting the pollen is performed by the wind. ”

“ As a shrub which grows against a wall loses its symmetry and becomes one-sided, so a young oyster, as soon as it leaves off its roving ways, and fixes its abode on the sea-mud, must begin to develop unsymmetrically. One side and one valve of the shell outgrow the other side and valve. In the Gryphgæa, an ancient species of oyster, this over-development of one side is carried further, and, while the right valve is small and flat, the left is deep and partially rolled up. ”

“ The more conspicuous variety attracts insects, and, as the stigma overtops the stamens, the agency of insects is required to secure fertilization. The flowers of the less conspicuous variety are not visited by insects, and, as the stigma does not overtop the stamens, the agency of insects is not required. The flower is self-fertilizing. These two forms graduate into each other, by connecting links which are found on the sunny edges of ditches.
Here is a very instructive lesson. Greater amounts of sunlight will account for the richer color of one variety ”

“ In the floral world that which first catches the attention is color, and, although in classification it passes for almost nothing, no other property or quality affects the mind so deeply. The great poets, who are always wiser than they know, hate literally painted the vices and virtues. ”

“ Perhaps the gelatinous knob you detached was not an Eolis, If your knife reaches a stomach which is not arborescent, you may have a Doris. The dorsal papillæ of Doris are genuine lungs, but they breathe for only part of the body. They aerate only the blood which goes to the liver, an organ which appears now, not as a row of bile-cells, but as a well-defined gland. The foot shares the labor of the lungs, they breathing for the liver, it for the rest of the body. ”

“ From the oyster to the snail we have passed, step by step, along successive stages of one-sided over-development. The facts have shown that a bivalve mollusk could not have descended from a univalve. As all mollusks in early life have the axis of the body straight, and the parts symmetrically arranged on either side, we may infer that bilateral symmetry characterized the remote ancestors of the molluscan type. Now, while a mollusk is bisymmetrical or nearly so, if the mantle secretes a shell it must be in in two parts, or, as in Chiton, in many parts. ”

“ The axis or stem is a fused series of midribs. The floral organs are leaves variously modified. Nay, we may look even beyond the leaf to the components of the leaf, for thought cannot rest till it finds the ultimate unit. This is a cell, and the lowest plant is simply a cell. Cells adherent to cells form a frond. A frond, by a little modification, passes into a leaf, and a leaf into a part of the flower. A sepal is a leaf changed but little; a petal is a leaf changed in color and texture ”

“ The right fold of the mantle spreads rapidly; the left, not at all. The right side of the body grows rapidly; the left remains almost stationary. The right valve of the shell grows rapidly, and twists over with the inclosed body; the left is completely aborted. Now, it is a very significant fact that the only parts which do not share this one-sided overgrowth are the head and creeping disk; and these are the parts which, not being covered by the mantle, do not become incased in the shell. Exposed to the water or the air equally on both sides, they retain their bilateral symmetry. ”

“ It will be seen that the stamens are shorter than the style. How is the anther to be liberated from the pouch? And how is the pollen to be carried to the stigma?
Fig 2.
The kalmia is one of the most showy shrubs along the wooded way-sides of New England, and is very attractive to bumble-bees. Now, your bumble-bee is the clumsiest of insect. His action is as ungraceful as his person. He can do nothing expertly and neatly. He cannot even sting you while on the wing, but must first alight and adjust himself. ”

“ The history of the inner lung is indicated by fishes and amphibians. The history of the outer lung is indicated in these naked mollusks.
Eolis, which shows us the beginning of a liver, or perhaps the last stage of its reduction, seems to be prehistoric as to the gill. One part of the surface absorbs oxygen as well as another. If we leave the beach and the Eolids for mid-ocean and the Pteropods, we shall find the first shadowing forth of a gill. In the Pteropod one part of the skin is a little more vascular than the rest, and on this part the blood is more freely oxidized. ”

“ We have chosen for our study these slugs of the sea to develop a phase of evolution not generally understood. Evolution does not imply an unbroken course of progression. It does not imply a tendency in every thing to become something else and better. ”

“ Flowers must vary with insects, and insects with flowers—yucca with yuccasella, and yuccasella with yucca—or both must die.
We have now the rationale of colors and odors. As vitality seems to have some general relation to color, perhaps the first show of color in a floral envelope was due to a slight diminution of vital force. [2] Color being advantageous to the plant by attracting insects, when once it appeared its shades would be multiplied and intensified age after age, by natural selection. ”

“ If such a free-moving body became fixed, unless as a stemmed Ascidian, its parts would be differently conditioned as to environment, and the side more favored would outgrow the other. As the first part of the snail's body to bend out of line with the axis is the intestinal canal, we infer that this bend occurred far back in the snail's ancestry. It occurs in the oyster. As the last organ to share the general twist resulting from unequal growth of the sides is the heart, we infer that displacement of this organ occurred later down in the history of the type. ”

“ As the Falls have receded by the action of the spray on the shale below, and the breaking and falling down of the undermined limestone above, now that the entire precipice is limestone, the features of the cataract will begin to change. The rock will wear away faster at the top than at the bottom, and the great Niagara—only a hundred feet high now—will dwindle away into a succession of cascades and rapids. ”

“ Fifty-two thousand cubic feet of water which belong to her, every summer minute be diverts to his own uses. Another century will see him on every acre along the borders of the upper lakes. Every forest he fells, every acre he ploughs, will affect, though inappreciably, the flow of water over the Falls. Time may come when his hand, laid on the earth in gigantic enterprise, will cause the Falls to shrink into insignificance. He will make these lakes furnish him highways to the ocean, east and south. ”

“ Theoretically, a fruit is a branch with its leaves transformed. If the reader will take an apple—a rotten one is best—and cut it through from flower-scar to stem, he will find a core of five carpels, and about midway between the core and the rind he will see a green, fibrous line (Fig. 9) . If he will look now at the flower, he will find the cup or calyx of five sepals, the corolla of five petals, the stamens many (a number of whorls) , and the pistils five (one whorl) . ”