Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen

“ You may observe that, whenever an artist wants to make a tropical picture, he puts a group of cocoa-nut palms in the foreground, as much as to say, "You see there's no deception; these are the genuine, unadulterated tropics." But as to painting the tropics without the palms, he might just as well think of painting the desert without the camels. At eight or ten years old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms of the ordinary palm-type, degraded likenesses of the lilies and yuccas, greenish and inconspicuous, but visited by insects for the sake of their pollen. ”

“ No other plant is useful to us in so many diverse and remarkable manners. It has been truly said of that friend of man, the domestic pig, that he is all good, from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail; but even the pig, though he furnishes us with so many necessaries or luxuries—from tooth-brushes to sausages, from ham to lard, from pepsine-wine to pork pies—does not nearly approach, in the multiplicity and variety of his virtues, the all-sufficing and world-supplying cocoa-nut. ”

“ As they hang pendent from their native boughs, clustering in brilliant masses, or scattered here and there as points of brighter light amid the dark foliage which throws up in strong relief their exquisite hues, we may recognize in their beauty the ultimate source of all that refined pleasure which mankind derives from the varied shades of earth and sea and sky, of flower and bird and butterfly, and even of the "human face divine" itself. ”

“ What a splendid and a noble prospect for humanity in its future evolutions may we not find in this thought that, from the coarse animal pleasure of beholding food, mankind has already developed, through delicate gradations, our modern disinterested love for the glories of sunset and the melting shades of ocean, for the gorgeous pageantry of summer flowers, and the dying beauty of autumn leaves, for the exquisite harmony which reposes on the canvas of Titian, and the golden haze which glimmers over the dreamy visions of Turner! ”

“ Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that the cocoa-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the delightful information, innocently conveyed in that delicious dialect of which he is so great a master, that it is really "a drupaceous fruit with a fibrous mesocarp." Still, in spite of Smelfungus with his nice, hair-splitting distinctions, it remains true that humanity at large will still call a nut a nut, and that the cocoa-nut is the highest known development of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and most richly stored seed of any known plant ”

“ THE tall choke-cherry tree in the corner of the meadow, near the hickory clump, is a favorite resort of all the fruit-eating birds in the township for half a mile around in every direction. To the judicious human palate, indeed, the flavor of choke-cherries is not exactly alluring or attractive; they have a disagreeable astringent tinge about their pulp that rather reminds one of alum or borax, and they are not sweet enough or luscious enough to be worth eating by people who have grapes and plums and peaches and apples and a dozen other cultivated fruits at easy command. ”

“ Odd as it may sound to say so, I believe we owe almost entirely to insects the whole presence of color in nature, otherwise than green; without them our world would be wanting in more than half the beautiful objects which give it its greatest æsthetic charm in the appreciative eyes of cultivated humanity. Of course, if insects had never been, the great external features of the world would still remain essentially the same. The earth-sculpture that gives rise to mountains and valleys, downs and plains, glens and gorges, is wholly unconnected with these minute living agents ”

“ You take the cool cup thankfully and swallow it down at one long draught; fresh as a May morning, pure as an English hill-side spring, delicate as—well, as cocoa-nut water. None but itself can be its parallel. It is certainly the most delicious, dainty, transparent, crystal drink ever invented. ”

“ Their long, feathery leaves spreading out in great clumps from the buried stock, and waving with lithe motion before the strong sea-breeze of the Indies, are the very embodiment of those deceptive ideal tropics which, alas! are to be found in actual reality nowhere on earth save in the artificial palm-houses at Kew, and the Casino Gardens at too entrancing Monte Carlo.
For the first two or three years the young palms must be well watered, and the soil around them opened; after which the tall, graceful stem begins to rise rapidly into the open air. ”

“ IN the whole museum of Nature the eye of the artist can find nothing lovelier than flowers; but the second rank in beauty may be fairly claimed on behalf of fruits. Whether we look at the golden oranges, the pink-cheeked mangoes, the purple star-apples, and the scarlet capsicums of the south, or at our own crimson cherries, blushing grapes, bright holly-berries, and rosy apples, we are equally struck with the delicacy of their melting tints and the graceful curves of their rounded form. ”

“ Just as the peach, which a dog would reject, has become delicious to our sense of taste; just as the pineapple, at which he would sniff unconcernedly, has become exquisite to our sense of smell—so the pure tints of the plum, the orange, the mango, and the pomegranate, which he would disregard, have become lovely to our sense of color. ”

“ Now, the moths fly about in the dusk or late at night; the flowers which attract them are pale, lacking in brilliancy, and, above all, destitute of honey-guides in the shape of lines or spots; and the insects themselves are generally dark and dingy in coloration. Whenever they possess any beauty of color, it takes the form of silvery scales which reflect what little light there may be in the gray gloaming. The butterflies, on the other hand, fly by day, and display, as we know, the most beautiful colors of all insects. ”

“ We shall thus trace throughout the whole pedigree of wheat from the time when its ancestors first diverged from the common stock of the lilies and the water-plantains, to the time when savage man found it growing wild among the untilled plains of prehistoric Asia, and took it under his special protection in the little garden-plots around his wattled hut, whence it has gradually altered under his constant selection into the golden grain that now covers half the lowland tilth of Europe and America. ”

“ The beauty and the glory of the world are not for the eyes of man alone; they appeal equally to the bee and the butterfly, to the bird and the child. To some people it strangely seems a nobler belief that one animal only out of all the earth enjoys and appreciates this perpetual pageant of natural loveliness ”

“ Hence we are led to the inquiry—What is the actual function which food subserves in the human body? Why is it true that we must eat or we must die, while the snake and the snail can fast for months or years together with impunity? How do we differ from these lower animals in such a remarkable degree, when all the operations of our bodies so closely resemble theirs in general principle?
Everybody has heard it said that food is to men and animals what fuel is to a steam-engine. ”

“ In the first place, its color, instead of being brilliant and attractive, like that of most edible fruits, is very quiet and unobtrusive, being green while the nut still remains among the fresh foliage upon the branches of the tree, and pale brown when it falls upon the dead leaves and dry grasses that cover the damp and moldering ground beneath. If the hickory-nut were a conscious creature which deliberately wished to escape notice, these are the precise tactics which it would be likely to adopt for the sake of protection. ”

“ A plume from the neck or back, though still beautiful with golden green and faintly purplish blue, would not have exhibited those splendid eye-like spots which reflect the sunlight in a mingled mass of glory from this perfect tail-covert. Only in the most fitting positions for decoration do birds, as a rule, expend their choicest designs. ”

“ Fancy yourself a seed-pea, anxious to sprout, but coated all round with a hard covering of impermeable sealing-wax, and you will be in a position faintly to appreciate the unfortunate predicament of a grower cocoa-nut. Natural selection, however—that deus ex machina of modern science, which can perform such endless wonders, if only you give it time enough to work in and variations enough to work upon—natural selection has come to the rescue of the unhappy plant by leaving it a little hole at the top of the shell, out of which it can push its feathery green head without difficulty. ”

“ Earth beneath and primitive trees overhead would all alike present a single field of unbroken and unvarying green. No scarlet flower, golden fruit, or gay butterfly would give a gleam of brighter and warmer coloring to the continuous verdure of that more than tropical forest. ”

“ I do not mean our practical indebtedness to insects for honey and bees'-wax, silk and satin, cochineal and lacquer, or a hundred other such-like useful products: these, indeed, are many and valuable in their own way, though far less so than the tribute we draw from most of the other great classes of animal life. But there is one debt we owe them so out of all proportion to their size and relative importance in the world that it is strange it should so seldom meet with due recognition. ”

“ The sole object of flowering is the production of seeds—that is to say, of embryo plants, destined to replace their parents, and continue the life of their species to future generations. Flowers and seeds go together; every flower producing seed, and every seed springing from a flower. Ferns and other like plants, which have no blossoms, bring forth spores which grow into shapeless little fronds, instead of true seeds containing a young plantlet. But all flowering species produce some kind of genuine fruit, supplied with more or less nutriment for the tender embryo in its earlier days. ”

“ Surrounded for generations and generations by gorgeous orchids and trumpet-creepers, from which they sucked the stored-up nectar, by gleaming purple or golden fruits, by burnished beetles, metallic butterflies, bronze-scaled lizards, and coral snakes, their prey or their enemies, exercising their eyes perpetually in the search for food among the exquisite objects of their environment, and safe from almost all foes except those of their own class, tropical birds have naturally developed the most gorgeous and the most perfect forms and colors in the whole animal creation. ”

“ The great American forests are the very paradise of endless hungry nut-eaters, from the common gray squirrel, the flying-squirrels, and the numerous other greedy rodents of the Northern plains, to the screaming parrots and powerful-billed monkeys of the tropical South American jungles. ”

“ Whenever an animal exercises a faculty much, the exercise comes to have pleasant feelings attached to it; and this is especially the case with all sense-organs. Creatures which live on honey love sweet things: carnivores delight in the taste of blood. Singing birds listen with interest to musical notes: and even insects will chirp in response to a chirp like their own. So, creatures which pass all their lives in the search for bright flowers must almost inevitably come to feel pleasure in the perception of brilliant colors. ”

“ Then the nuts gradually swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even under the brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics are hot, though in other respects I hold them to be arrant impostors, like that precocious American youth who announced on his tenth birthday that in his opinion life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst thing about the cocoa-nut palm, the missionaries always say, is the fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes on bearing fruit uninterruptedly for forty years. ”

“ You cannot grow a blade of wheat or a sprouting pea in the dark. The seed will germinate, it is true; but, as soon as the primitive store of nutriment has been used up, it will wither away and die. Naturally enough, when all its original energy is gone, and no new energy is afforded to it from without in the form of sunshine, it cannot miraculously make growth for itself out of nothing. But if you put a hyacinth bulb in a dark cellar, and supply it with a sufficiency of water, it will grow and blossom almost as luxuriantly as in a sunny window. ”

“ Nothing could be more simple or more satisfactory. And yet it is difficult to see the precise moral distinction between the owner of a cocoa-nut grove in the South-Sea Islands and the owner of a coal-mine or a big estate in commercial England. Each lounges decorously through life after his own fashion; only the one lounges in a Russia-leather chair at a club in Pall Mall, while the other lounges in a nice soft dust-heap beside a rolling surf in Tahiti or the Hawaiian Archipelago. ”

“ It does not seem probable, to me at least, that a naturally hairy species would entirely divest itself of its hair through sexual selection, especially as the first steps of such a process could hardly fail to render it a mongrel-looking and miserable creature; but it seems natural enough that, if the original impulse was given by a physical denudation, the influence of sexual selection would rapidly strengthen and complete the process. Indeed, if a hairy animal once began losing its hair, the only beauty which it could aim at would be that of a smooth and shiny naked black skin. ”

“ Nor is it only in the choice of mates that the nascent taste for color displays itself. Even below the limits of humanity bright-hued objects afford a passing pleasure to more than one aesthetically-endowed species. Monkeys love to pull crimson flowers in pieces, dart in pursuit of brilliant tropical birds, and are attracted by the sight of red or yellow rags. ”

“ Even if we possessed no mineral wealth, it is probable that our geographical position would still have insured us a considerable commercial importance as the carriers of the civilized world. Britain happens to occupy the central point in the hemisphere of greatest land, and this fact, aided by its insular nature, could not fail to make it a great mercantile country as soon as navigation, nursed in the Mediterranean, had advanced sufficiently to embrace the whole ocean-coasts of Asia, Africa, and America. But without coal and iron we should have been mere merchants, not manufacturers. ”

“ It will suffice to remember, in passing, that from the feather mantles of Hawaian kings, the feather kirtles of American Indians, and the feather mosaics of Mexico, to the plumes of our own court-dress, our own military uniforms, and our own quaintly surviving funeral processions, these same "dermal modifications" of birds have served an aesthetic purpose, better or worse, throughout the whole course of human history. ”