Trillium

“ Any sound that occurs within it is, on a lesser scale, like a sound in a cathedral. The tree itself when struck gives a musical note. Strike an oak or an elm on the trunk with a stick, and the [061] sound is mute; strike a Scotch fir, and it is a note of music.
Trillium in the Wild Garden.
In the copse are some prosperous patches of the beautiful North American Wood-lily (Trillium grandiflorum) . It likes a bed of deep leaf-soil on levels or cool slopes in woodland, where its large white flowers and whorls of handsome leaves look quite at home. ”

“ Trilliums are amongst the North American herbaceous plants which have lately become fashionable, and easy to be bought in England; but ere they did so, Julie made some ineffectual attempts to transplant tubers of them into English soil; and the last letter she received from Fredericton contained a packet of red Trillium seeds, which came too late to be sown before she died. The species which she immortalized in "The Blind Hermit and the Trinity Flower," was T. erythrocarpum. The story is a graceful legend of an old Hermit whose life was spent in growing herbs for the healing of diseases ”

“ How some of these early flowers secure the perpetuation of their species is an interesting study for amateur botanists. In the case of the trillium the fruit is a three-lobed reddish berry, but one has to search for it as diligently as Diogenes did for an honest man before he finds it. The plant seldom sets seed in this vicinity, but seems to depend rather upon its tuber-like rootstocks in which the leaves lie curled all through the winter. The hepatica attracts pollen-feeding flies, female hive-bees and the earliest butterflies, and is thus cross-fertilized to some extent ”

“ The Red Trilliums are rich but sombre in colour, the petals are longish-ovate, regular, not waved, and the pollen is of a greyish dusty hue while that of the White species is bright orange-yellow. The leaves are of a dark lurid green, the colouring matter of the petals seems to pervade the leaves; and here, let me observe, that the same remark may be made of many other plants. In purple flowers we often perceive the violet hue to be perceptible in the stalk and under part of the leaves, and sometimes in the veins and roots. Red flowers again show the same tendency in stalk and veins. ”

“ Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
The fruit of the trilliums is very handsome. I found some a month ago, a singular red, angular-cased pulp, drooping, with the old anthers surrounding it three quarters of an inch in diameter; and now there is another kind, a dense crowded cluster of many ovoid berries turning from green to scarlet or bright brick-color. ”

“ And the happiest day of all was when Trois Angliches took Trilby and Jeannot (for so the mite was called) to spend the Sunday in the woods at Meudon, and breakfast and dine at the garde champêtre's. Swings, peep-shows, donkey-rides; shooting at a mark with cross-bows and little pellets of clay, and smashing little plaster figures and winning macaroons; losing one's self in the beautiful forest; catching newts and tadpoles and young frogs; making music on mirlitons. Trilby singing "Ben Bolt" into a mirliton was a thing to be remembered, whether one would or no! ”

“ Students of trilobites have always wanted specimens to be delivered to them weathered out of the rock by nature and revealing the ventral anatomy without further work than the collecting, but the wish has never been fulfilled. In the Utica black shales, near Rome, New York, there was finally discovered in 1892 a layer less than ten millimeters thick, bearing hundreds of Triarthrus becki with most of the ventral anatomy intact. ”

“ Different genera and species of the trilobite are now found in almost every part of the globe, and are frequently exceedingly abundant in the rocks which contain them. That they must have swarmed in particular places, is abundantly evident from a number of localities in our own country,—millions, for example, must have lived and died not far from Trenton falls, in the State of New York. ”

“ A knowledge of the history of trelliage and an appreciation of its practical application to modern needs is a conjurer's wand—you can wave it and create all sorts of ephemeral constructions that will last your time and pleasure. You may give your trellis any poetic shape your vision may take. You may dream and realize enchanting gardens, with clipped hedges and trellis walls. You may transform a commonplace porch into a gay garden room, with a few screens of trellis and many flower boxes of shrubs and vines. ”

“ The main axis of A. hepatica has unlimited growth (it is biaxial) , and the flowers are borne laterally in the axils of the scale-leaves; in the others (uniaxial) the flower is terminal, and the rhizome becomes a sympodium after the first flowering.—Thalictrum (Meadow Rue) has no involucre; 4–5-leaved, greenish perianth. The receptacle is flat. The stamens are brightly-coloured and have long filaments; 1–5 accessory flowers may occur in the leaf-axils of the panicle-like inflorescence. ”

“ The full ontogeny is not known of any species with compound eyes in which the median tubercle is present in the adult, but theoretically the median eye should be most prominent in the young of just those primitive trilobites about whose development most is known. ”

“ The pygidium of trilobites is compared with the metasomatic shield of Limulus. No homology, if homology is intended, could be more erroneous. The metasomatic shield of Limulus is, as shown by ontogeny and phylogeny, formed by the fusion of segments formerly free, and includes the segments between the cephalic and anal shields, or what would be known as the thorax of a trilobite. ”

“ In Graphis scripta (fig. 26) the thallus is thin, somewhat membranous, smoothish, shining, greyish white, and faintly bordered with black. The lirellæ (fig. 27) are partly sunk in the bark, winding and narrow, some being simple, others branched; and they are surrounded by a raised border, formed by the thallus. The lirellæ are lined at the sides with a black (carbonaceous) layer or excip ́ulum, within which are situated the asci and paraphyses. The spores (Pl. II. fig. 29) are 8-cleft, the segments being again divided longitudinally into little spores or sporidia. ”

“ A high-speed, erratic motion which could be produced by the sudden flap of a pygidium would be of more service in escape than any amount of steady swiftness produced by the oar-like appendages of an animal of the shape of a trilobite. ”

“ In some cases the individual consists of a minute simple cell which multiplies by cell-division; in others the body or thallus is made up of a number of similar units, while in a great number of forms there is a well-marked physiological division of labour, as expressed both in the external division of the thallus into distinct organs corresponding in function to the root, stem, and leaves of the higher plants, and further in the high degree of histological differentiation of the tissues. In other thallophytes, again, the thallus is a coenocyte either unseptate or incompletely septate ”

“ The sexual generation, gametophyte, or prothallium, is always a thallus, although not always green and leaf-like (Figs. 205, 215, 222, 229, 235, etc.) It is very small, even in cases where it attains the greatest development, and consists only of parenchymatous cells. The prothallium is nourished by hair-like roots (rhizoids) and has only a transitory existence, dying soon after the fertilisation of its oosphere. ”

“ The thallus has one or more apical cells, grows principally by apical growth, and may be differentiated into root, stem, and leaf. The chromatophores vary in form, but have a red or brownish colour, due to chlorophyll and phycoerythrin. Asexual reproduction by motionless tetraspores, which generally arise by the division into four of the contents of the tetrasporangium. The carpogonium has a trichogyne, and the carpospores, which are formed indirectly from the fertilised oosphere, possess a cell-wall. ”

“ Every study of the trilobite, whether of adult, young, or protaspis, indicates the primitiveness of the lateral extensions or pleural lobes. The same studies indicate as clearly the location of the vital organs along the median lobe. These suggestions all point to a soft-bodied, depressed animal composed of few segments, probably with simple marginal eyes, a mouth beneath the anterior margin, tactile organs at one or both ends, with an oval shape, and a straight narrow gut running from anterior mouth to terminal anus. ”

“ By "whole ones" perfect individuals are not meant, for before they became fossils the wear and tear of their time and the process of decomposition had taken away all the softer parts and even most of the harder exterior covering. What is usually preserved and revealed to us when the trilobites weather out of the embrace of their entombing rocks is the test, the hard shell of the upper or dorsal side. ”

“ Now, I have told you the torula grows—it has life; but how does it grow—as a mineral, a vegetable, or an animal? The mineral grows larger and larger by additions made to its outside. This is called growth by accretion. But the torula or yeast-cell grows by taking in new substance in among the particles of its old substance, and this kind of growth is called by a long name—intussusception. ”

“ In one respect, the discovery of thallium presented even a greater degree of interest than attached to the discovery of cæsium and rubidium. For whereas these two elements were at once recognized as analogues of the well-known metal potassium, thallium can hardly be said, even at the present time, to be definitely and generally recognized by chemists as the analogue of any particular metal, or as a member of any particular family of elements. ”

“ The societies advised that trilithon 6, 7, with lintel—which had slewed round—and trilithon 56, which was leaning at a dangerous angle, should be examined with a view to replacement with as little excavation as possible; that the monolith and lintel 22 be replaced, and its companion sarsen (21) secured; and that trilithon 57, 58, should be re-erected in its place, which was exactly known. Steps were taken to place the matter in the hands of engineering experts. On the 19th of September 1901 trilithon 56 was successfully raised to a perpendicular position. ”

“ The ancestor of the trilobite is believed to have been a soft-bodied, free-swimming, flat, blind or nearly blind animal of few segments, because:
(a) the form of both adult and embryo is of a type more adapted for floating than crawling;
(b) the large pygidium is shown by ontogeny to be primitive, and the elongate worm-like form secondary;
(c) the history of the trilobites shows a considerable increase in the average number of segments in successive periods from the Cambrian to the Permian ”

“ If we sprinkle thallium salt in the flame the green line of that element will be visible in the spectrum. If we take the lamp away and place a lime light or a piece of white-hot iron in front of the slit we shall get a brilliant continuous spectrum not crossed by any lines, either bright or dark. Insert now the alcohol-sodium-thallium lamp between the lime light and the slit, and the observer will see the two sodium lines and one thallium line in the same places as before, but as dark lines on a background of bright continuous spectrum, as: illustrated in the lower of the two spectra. ”

“ When the free cheek is dissevered it shows no trace of the ridge, there is only a large scallop on the spot where it embraced the ridge. In the Paradoxidæ the rim of the indenture and the ridge are in so close contact that there is not the least place for an eye between them, as can be seen in the few specimens with a complete head. In all oculate trilobites again without any exception the facial suture separates that part of the eye which is the real visual organ with corneal facets, from the interior often elevated portion, opposite it, the so called palpebral lobe. ”

“ The same inference follows, but with cumulative force, when we see nearly four hundred microscopic lenses set side by side, in the compound eye of a fossil Trilobite; and the weight of the argument is multiplied a thousand fold, when we look to the infinite variety of adaptations by which similar instruments have been modified, through endless genera and species, from the long-lost Trilobites, of the Transition strata, through the extinct Crustaceans of the Secondary and Tertiary formations, and thence onward throughout existing Crustaceans, and the countless hosts of living Insects. ”

“ It needs only a glance at the very young to convince one that the embryos had swimming habits, so that in this form one sees the adaptation of the individual during its history to all modes of life open to a trilobite. The habits of the Harpedidæ may have been similar to those of the Trinucleidæ, but the members of this family are supplied with broad flat genal spines. ”

“ That organic remains furnish us with the most satisfactory evidence of the identity or dissimilarity of certain formations, is a disputed point with some geologists [45] It cannot reasonably be doubted, that new and isolated facts have been made the basis of a too hasty generalization. On this subject Count Rasoumowsky makes the following remarks:—"Les divers gisemens des Trilobites ne me semblent pas non plus pouvoir être déterminés avec quelque précision. ”