CONCERNING LAWNS, WITH INCIDENTAL OBSERVATIONS ON EARTHWORMS

I am not a lover of lawns; on the contrary, I regard them, next to gardens, as the least interesting adjuncts of the country-house. Grass, albeit the commonest, is yet one of the most beautiful things in Nature when allowed to grow as Nature intended, or when not too carefully trimmed and brushed. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn grass. This may be regarded as the mental attitude of the wild man from the woods, but something may be said for it. Sir Walter Raleigh explained, centuries ago, the reason of our desire for and pleasure in trim gardens, lawns, parks, and neatly cut hedges of box and privet and holly: those surroundings of the house were invented as a refuge from the harsh, brambly outside wilderness, the stinging nettles, scratching thorns, sharp hurtful stones and hidden pits--from all the roughnesses and general horriblenesses of an incult Nature.

But that’s all a feeling of long ago, it may be answered; it has gone out now, and we have come back to Nature--the dear old beautiful mother! Have we indeed? Lawns have not gone out; on the contrary, it appears to me that the idea of the lawn, like the idea of clothes, has entered into our souls and manifests itself more and more in all our surroundings, our dwellings, our persons, our habits. Sir Almroth Wright cried out a little while ago against our habit of scrubbing our bodies every day and rubbing them dry with rough towels to polish and make them shine like our glass, china, and plated table-ware. When Nathaniel Hawthorne came to the Old Home from an outlandish United States of America where this idea of the lawn had not yet penetrated so deeply, he spent some time at a great country-house where he stayed in running about the lawns and park in search of a nettle, or weed, or wilding of some kind to rest his eyes on. The novel smoothness and artificiality of everything made him mad. And if Sir Walter Raleigh himself were to return to us in all his glory and splendour, and if some one, opening the History of the World, should read that passage about lawns to him, I think he would cry out: “Oh, but you have now gone too far in that direction! Your rooms, your tables, all the thousand appointments of your establishment, your own appearance, your hard-scraped skins, your conversation suffocate me. Let me out--let me go back to the place I came from!”

What then of all the beautiful things we say of Nature? it may be asked. Why, only this: it amounts to as much as all the beautiful things we say about painted pictures, jewels, tapestries, old lace, Chippendale furniture, and what not. We are not _in_ Nature; we are out of her, having made our own conditions; and our conditions have reacted upon and made us what we are--artificial creatures. Nature is now something pretty to go and look at occasionally, but not too often, nor for too long a time.

So much in defence of my attitude concerning lawns. There is no doubt that, seen at a right distance, a fine country-house or mansion, standing isolated from other buildings and from trees and gardens, looks best on a level green expanse. At this moment I recall Shaw House, Avington House, and two or three others, but every reader who knows England will have the image of half-a-dozen or more such buildings in his mind.

Now I think that this grass setting would be just as effective or more effective if left more in its natural state. Seen closely, the smooth lawn is a weariness to the eye like all smooth monotonous surfaces; like the smooth or oily unwrinkled sea, for example, which the eye refuses to dwell on; or like the blue sky without a cloud or a soaring bird on it. Such a sky may be good to be under but tiresome to the vision after three seconds. If you look at it for a whole minute, or for an hour without weariness, it is because you are thinking of something, which means that you are occupied with seeing mental images and not the sky. An acre or so of green linoleum or drugget, drawn evenly and smoothly over the ground surrounding a large house, would probably have as good an effect as a perfectly smooth grass lawn. But into this question I am not going any further. I write about lawns because there are such things, and I have to see them and sometimes live in sight of one. I have had one before my eyes for hours this very day while staying at a friend’s house in the country. A week ago I went up to London for a couple of days, and on my return my hostess informed me that I had no sooner left than the gardener presented himself before her to ask her if now that her visitor had gone away for a day or two she would allow him to sweep the lawn and make it tidy.

It was a good-sized lawn, with a group of well-grown birches on the west side, and one day in early November the south-west wind blew and carried thousands of small yellow heart-shaped leaves over the green expanse, making it beautiful to look at. By and by the gardener came with his abhorred brushwood-broom and swept that lovely novel appearance away, to my great disgust. Then the blessed wind blew again and roared all night, swaying the trees and tossing out fresh clouds on clouds of the brilliant little leaves all over the monotonous sheet of green, and lo! in the morning it was beautiful once more. And I stood and admired it, and it was like walking on a velvet green carpet embroidered with heart-shaped golden leaves. Naturally, when I saw the gardener coming on with his broom, I cried out aloud and brought the lady of the house on the scene, and she graciously ordered him off. It was only when I went up to town that he was allowed to work his will.

I now propose to tell the story of another lawn of which I had the supervision for two or three months; a small lawn at a cottage surrounded by green fields lent to me by a friend one summer end; it was mowed and looked after generally by a man who came once a week from the village, and he also had the garden to see after. In July and August, when the sun was low enough to allow one to sit out of doors and of the shade of trees I lounged and read and drank my tea there, and noticed that it was abundantly sprinkled with plantains. Now I don’t mind plantains on a lawn because, as I have already said and ingeminated, lawns are nothing to me unless flowers are allowed to blossom and leaves blown from coloured woods to lie on them, but I remembered my friends who had lent me their paradisaical retreat with its green lawn from which, idling in my canvas chair, I looked on a green valley and a swift chalk stream with coots and moorhens disporting themselves on it, and beautiful hanging woods beyond. I remembered them, and in my desire to do something to express my gratitude I said I would clear this one lawn of its plantains.

Going to the tool-house, I found a long, narrow, sharp-pointed trowel, which was just what I wanted, and also saw there an important-looking weed-killing instrument and a can of poison, which I certainly did not want. I started taking up the plantains, working the trowel down to the end of the root so as to leave nothing of the tenacious cunning creature in the ground. By and by the man from the village came and saw the beginning of my work--my little harvest gathered from four or five square yards of lawn. He smiled, and when I asked him why he smiled, he said the lawn had been in that condition for the past ten years and nothing could be done to get rid of the plantains. He couldn’t say how many quarts of poison had been squirted into the roots, but they refused to die, and so on and so forth. On his next visit he found a huge heap of uprooted plantains in the middle of the lawn, left there for his special benefit, and not one growing plantain left on the lawn.

“Ah, yes,” he said--it was just what I had expected him to say--“the fact is I’ve never had the time to do it properly. Always too busy with the rose garden, and plantains take a lot of time, you know. Certainly we did what we could with the weed-killer, but it seems it didn’t amount to much.”

What it amounted to was this: here and there all about the lawn were round brown spots, the size of a crown-piece or larger, where the grass had perished and refused to grow again. These unsightly spots marked the places where plantains had been destroyed by the weed-killer, the metal point of which is thrust into the centre of the plant and the poison squirted in. Now this poison does not kill the plantain only but the roots of the grasses as well--hence the naked brown spots. How long does the poison keep its potency in the moist mould? A long time, I should think, seeing that these naked spots were some months old. I also wanted to know if the poison was deadly to other forms of life in the soil, especially to earthworms. To ascertain this I took up mould enough from one of the barren spots to fill a flower-pot, then filled a second flower-pot with mould from outside the lawn, then went to the rose-garden at the back to dig for worms, and selecting two full-grown vigorous specimens, put one in each pot. The following day I turned them out and found that the first one had lost its vigour, and not only was it languid in its motions, but the colour had changed to a dull pink and had wholly lost the rainbow bloom of the healthy earthworm. There was no change in the healthy colour and activity of the second worm. I put them back in their respective pots and examined them again next day: the first was dead, its body a dull red and flabby. The second was still just as strong and active and of as fresh and healthy a colour as when first taken from the earth.

I was satisfied that weed-killers are even more potent than I had thought them. As a bird-lover I had always hated them on account of their destructiveness to the small birds of the homestead, the blackbird and song-thrush, chaffinch, robin, dunnock, and other species that are accustomed to seek for small morsels on the gravelled walks where these poisons are so much used by gardeners to extirpate the small hardy weeds that root themselves in such places.

I didn’t pursue the matter further, and the subject of lawns and earthworms was out of my mind for two or three weeks when something happened at the end of August to revive my interest in it. There came a wet day followed by a gale of wind which lasted a part of the night, and next morning I found that the wind in its violence had well-nigh stripped a row of young false acacia trees growing on the south side of their still living green leaves and sprinkled them abundantly all over the lawn. As I sat out of doors that afternoon I didn’t quite like the disorderly appearance of the long green leaves torn off before their time lying all about me, and I took it into my head to sweep them away, but when I set myself to do it with the brushwood broom, not a leaf could I sweep from its place! I then discovered to my surprise that the leaves were all made fast to the ground; every leaf had been seized and dragged by an earthworm to its run, the terminal leaflet rolled up and pulled into the hole, but no further could the leaf go, since the next two opposite leaflets on the stem were like a cross-bar and prevented further progress. In every case the terminal leaflet was buried and the rest of the leaf lying out on the grass.

We know that earthworms live on the vegetable mould in which they move and have their being, and nourish themselves by passing the earth they remove in excavating their tunnels through their bodies. It is assumed by naturalists that they extract certain “salts” on which they live from the soil they swallow. But as the worm is not a vegetable I prefer to believe that they exist on the microscopic organisms in the mould. Be this as it may, the worm does not live by mould alone; he is also a vegetable eater and feeds on decayed leaves of trees when they fall in his way, dragging them into his hole by night. But the leaf he prefers is the decayed one, and it struck me that these lawn worms were in an extraordinary state of leaf-hunger to seize upon and drag these fresh living leaves into their holes as soon as the wind had torn them off.

The conclusion I formed was that the lawn earthworm is a starved worm, and I began to examine and compare the lawn worms with those living in the soil away from the lawn. I found that when I dug for worms in the moist earth in likely spots away from the lawn, the mere act of striking the spade or fork deep into the soil brought the worms with a rush to the surface, and in many instances the rush was so rapid that at the moment when the spade was being driven deep down by the foot, a big vigorous worm would appear on the surface thrusting half the length of his long body straight up and looking like the round polished stem of some species of squill or lily springing miraculously from the earth. Worms, I found, are extraordinarily sensitive to earth vibration: thus when one walks upon or strikes the ground with a stick, they go deeper down; but when the vibrations come from beneath or from the earth around them, they rush to the surface to escape from a subterranean enemy pursuing them in their own element. On the lawn I never succeeded in making the worms rush up to the surface by striking a spade or fork into the soil; and when I dug up a number of worms from the lawn and compared them with others from the soil outside, I found a great difference in them. The lawn worms were much smaller and were not nearly so vigorous in their movements as the others. The wonder was that worms should be found living in such numbers in the lawn soil in these somewhat unnatural conditions, when just outside the lawn there was a soil easier to penetrate and abundance of decaying leaves for them to feed on.

These incidental observations on earthworms in their relation to lawns caused me to regret that I had not made a better use of my opportunities of studying these creatures on former occasions, as it now appeared to me that much yet remains to be discovered anent their habits and effect on the soil and vegetation. My knowledge of them was little more than that of the ordinary person, and how much _he_ knows about the subject let the following incident show.

One evening I was with Mr. Frank E. Beddard at his club, and taking advantage of the occasion, asked him some question about earthworms, he being the greatest authority in the universe on the subject. It happened that another friend of his, a famous angler, was sitting near and overheard our conversation.

“Ah, yes--worms,” he said. “Before I forget all about it, I want to ask you if the worm we dig up in the sand for bait is the same as the common earthworm.”

“No,” said the other.

“Well, but they are both worms, are they not?”

“Yes.”

“And if they are both worms, what’s the difference?”

“They are both worms, and differ as much as a cat from a squirrel--both mammals.”

And that was all he would say: the subject of their differences could not be profitably discussed on that occasion and with persons who knew so little.

Like everybody else I had read Darwin’s classic, but what one reads does not inform the mind much unless one observes and thinks for oneself at the same time. The wonderful story of the action of earthworms on the earth’s surface only came home to me during the excavations at Silchester, when year after year the pavements and floors and foundations of houses and temples and public and private baths were uncovered until the entire 200 acres within the walls had been disclosed. It is not necessary to describe here, since we have it all in Darwin, just how the worms succeeded in burying in a century or two all that remained of a ruined Silchester--the outside wall excepted--to a depth of three to four feet beneath the surface. We know that for the last 800 years the ground has been cultivated above the buried city. When watching these excavations I discovered one fact about worms which Darwin missed. Among the best finds at Silchester were the large and in some cases uninjured mosaic floors of the more important houses, some of which were removed intact to Reading Museum, and may be seen there.

When one of these fine large floors was uncovered it remained _in situ_ until the late autumn, when it was taken up and removed. Observing these floors, after they had been washed and scrubbed until they looked as fresh as if made yesterday instead of nigh on twenty centuries ago, it surprised me to find that worms were quite abundant beneath them, that they came to the surface through small borings which were not noticed unless closely looked for; they came up by night, and in the morning the workmen had to sweep the castings away to make the floors clean. The question that suggested itself was: why did the worms continue to penetrate beneath the stone and cement floor after it had been buried so deep in the ground, and when they had, and had enjoyed for over a thousand years at the least, a soil formed of vegetable mould as deep as earthworms require to live and flourish in? A depth of three or four feet of mould is as much as they require, but they will, Darwin says, occasionally go deeper to five or six feet, and he gives nine feet as the greatest depth at which they have been found. Now at Silchester I saw some taken from a depth of twenty-five feet, and very many at eighteen to twenty feet. This was when the old Roman wells and other deep pits were cleaned out.

It struck me that these Silchester observations made a valuable contribution to a history of the earthworm’s life habits. For it should be borne in mind that the soil covering the buried city is a rich mould, which has been under cultivation for the last nine or ten centuries, and is the kind of soil in which the earthworm finds his best conditions and attains his greatest size and vigour. Consider next that the soil in the deep pits and everywhere beneath the Roman pavements is a cold, heavy, hardly-pressed earth undisturbed for many centuries, unpierced by root of plant or ray of sun, and probably to a great extent devoid of the microbic life which makes the upper soil alive. When you turn over this long-buried soil with the spade it has a heavy damp smell, but not the familiar earth-smell of _Clodothrix odorifera_. Yet down in this dark dead soil the worms will insist on descending, although their only way to it is through the few small cylindrical holes they have succeeded in boring through the partially rotted cement between the tiles, or where a minute stone has dropped out of the tesserae pavements. Their descent into these difficult places and down into the old pits involves long double journeys daily when they are forced to come up to deposit their castings on the surface.

What then is the force impelling them? Why do they leave a rich feeding-ground for a poor one? I take these facts in their relation to other well-known facts, as for example that of the quite extraordinary difference in size and vigour and colouring in the earthworms inhabiting different soils. They are like different species. Let us take the case of the London earthworm to be found in every few square yards of earth unbuilt on, even in the very heart of the City itself. Judging from all the specimens I have examined, this worm attains to about half the full normal size and is comparatively languid in his movements and rarely exhibits the brilliant play of colours seen in the large country worm in rich soil--the colour which is the sign of intensity of life. Doubtless he was once a big vigorous worm, but that was long ago in an old London, or Londineum, and he has had ample time to degenerate. In this state he is now biding his time, under our feet, and his time will come when our seven millions have faded or drifted away; then indeed he will recover his power, and slowly, patiently, unhasting and unresting, day and night, year by year, century after century, he will labour to sink away brick and stone beneath the surface and cover it all with a deep rich mould and a mantle of everlasting verdure.

Then we have the earthworms inhabiting heaths and all sandy soils throughout the land. They are no better than the London earthworms. One day last autumn I found the gardener at the house in a pine wood where I was staying at Ascot digging potatoes. I took a spade and went to him and started digging for worms at his side. There was a magnificent crop of potatoes, as it has been everywhere this autumn of 1918, but the earthworms we turned up were few in number and very poor specimens. “It is useless,” said the gardener, “to look for a big worm here--I never see one. It is the sand that starves them.”

I am not sure that this is a sufficient explanation: in the rich soils in these highly cultivated gardens in this heath and pine district where wealthy people have their homes, the worms, one would think, must find sufficient nourishment. It is more probable that their poor condition is due to something inimical to earthworms in the sand itself.

On the chalk, where the soil is thin, as in the sheep-walks, the earthworms are comparatively small in size, but vigorous and quick in their movements amidst the interlacing fibrous roots of the close turf. In the hollow places between the hills, where a deeper soil has been formed, the worms attain to their full size--all which goes to show that chalk itself is not inimical to worms. In heavy clays the appearance of the worms show that the conditions are not favourable.

Thus we see that earthworms are perpetually invading and peopling all soils, good and bad; also that if you have a piece of hard ground barren of food for worms and free of worms, where for long years they have not been permitted to exist, they will constantly flow in from all the surrounding rich soils where worms abound and flourish in order to get possession of it. The cause, I take it, is that the earthworm abhors the soil frequented by other worms, which is impregnated with the acid the worm secretes and discharges into the soil. The acid spoils the ground for him, and he prefers to go outside into the most barren and unsuitable places to remaining in it. And the perpetual desire to get away and seek pastures new is the reason of the wide distribution of the earthworm, of its universality, so that there is not a clod on the surface of the earth without a worm for inhabitant.

Three or four days after witnessing the remarkable phenomenon I described some pages back--the rush of hungry earthworms to secure a windfall of leaves torn before their time from the trees and consequently not well suited to their masticating powers--I paid a visit at a country-house a few miles away, and found there one of the finest lawns I had ever seen. The old Georgian house was built on an eminence overlooking the valley and stood in the centre of a square and perfectly flat piece of ground, which was all lawn; then the ground sloped on all sides to a terrace, and slope and terrace were all lawn too and one with the level ground above. The great extent and marvellous smoothness of this lawn filled me with admiration--when I saw it at a distance; but I no sooner set foot on it than I began to quarrel with it. To begin with, the ground was hard; there was no elastic, no real turf; it was like walking on flagstones. Nothing but grass grew on that lawn, not in a matted turf, but each grass or grass plant by itself, so that when looking closely down at one’s feet one saw the hard ground between the blades and roots. On all that ground there was not a daisy to be seen, nor any of the small creeping plants and clovers usually found on lawns.

Before my visit was over I succeeded in getting hold of the gardener and asked him how he managed to keep his large lawn so clean and smooth. He took it that I was praising his work and began to tell me what a tremendous task it was to keep it in that perfect condition.

“But I think,” said I, “that if you would call in the earthworms to help you and did less yourself you would have a better lawn.”

At first he thought I was joking and was much amused. Earthworms, he assured me, were the worst enemies of lawns--they made such a mess! His greatest trouble was to keep them down. He was always going round with a bucket of brine, particularly about the lower borders, where they were always trying to come in, and poured the brine down their holes. Brine was the best worm-killer he knew; and the result of his care and use of it was that you wouldn’t be able to find a worm on all that immense lawn.

I asked him if he could not understand that it was no pleasure to walk or sit or lie on a lawn where the ground was always dry and hard in spite of all the watering he gave it. To walk on his lawn tired and depressed me, whereas on the chalk-hill behind the house I could walk miles with pure delight, simply because it was a close-matted turf and was felt beneath the feet like a pile-carpet drawn over a thick rubber floor. It lifted me when I walked on it, and was better than the most luxurious couch to lie on, to say nothing of the pleasure one received from the sight of its small gem-like flowers and from its aromatic scent. As to the castings, they were unpleasant only when the lawn was wet in the morning, and only then when the grass was too thin. You do not see the castings on the thick turf on the downs, although if you take up a sod you find earthworms at the roots in abundance.

Well, he answered, a lawn could not have a turf like a chalk-hill fed by sheep, because--such a turf wasn’t the right one for a lawn to have. Then, as this seemed a rather poor argument, he suddenly brightened up and said: “And what about the moles? Do you know that with a large lawn like this, with grass fields all round it, you are always in danger of getting a mole--that is to say if there are any earthworms to attract him. And a mole can disfigure a lawn as much as if you had made a furrow with a plough across it.”

No doubt he was right there; but when I said that moles could be kept out by sinking a rabbit net to a depth of two or three feet beneath the surface and would save a lot of labour and expense, he only smiled and shook his head.

The gardener, like the gamekeeper, is never a person who will allow you to teach him anything, but after our conversation I was more convinced than ever that it would be better for the lawn if, instead of killing and starving the worms, we were to feed them and allow them to make and keep a turf.

With this idea in my mind I tried a fresh experiment. I pegged out a strip of the lawn at the cottage, about ten feet wide, and ran a cord on each side to keep it distinct from the rest of the ground, and over that strip I sprinkled leaves from the acacia and other trees abundantly. I examined the ground on the following day and saw no change. Leaves were still lying thickly on the ground, and it was impossible to tell whether any had been carried away or not. The next day it was the same. On the morning of the third day there was something new to note: it looked as if the worms inhabiting the quartered-off ground had suddenly developed a wonderful vigour and activity, or as if a rush of worms from all over the lawn to that favoured spot had taken place. The ground was thickly sprinkled over with castings, mostly under the herbage, although after a careful search I could not find a single casting anywhere else on the lawn. It was evident that the worms had been taking the leaves into their runs and feeding greedily on them, and I confidently expected that the result would be that in a little while the turf on the marked strip of ground would be thicker, greener, more elastic to the tread. Unfortunately I was obliged to leave the place when the experiment was just at its beginning, so that nothing was proved; and I hope that some reader of this paper, who possesses a lawn, or is about to form one, will carry the matter further and try to find out whether or not a better result may be had by encouraging the earthworms to work with and for us instead of regarding them as enemies and trying to suppress them.

INDEX

_Acherontia atropas_, 217-19

Adders, the quest of, 15; dreaming of, 19; reasons for not killing, 20-28; swallowing their young, 21; measuring, 25; capturing, 28-9; beautiful colours in, 29-32

Adder-stone, 16

Agouti, beauty of the, 288

Aldebaran, an intelligent visitor from, 37-40

Aldermaston, snake preserve at, 17

Ants, a danger to fledgelings, 5-6; 9-10; 13-14

_Aquilegia._ _See_ Columbine

_Ardea cinerea_ and _A. cocoi_. _See_ Heron

Arnold, Matthew, serpent poetry of, 195-7; lines on fritillary, 331

Badger, encounter with a, 51-2

Barrett, Charles, on ants destroying fledgelings in Australia, 14

Bastard balm, beauty and rarity of the, 327

Bats, Pliny on, 33; genealogy of, 33-6; how Nature made, 37-40; ferocity of, 41-2; migration, 42-44; sense organs, 44-6; Cuvierand Spallanzani on extra senses in, 45-8; J. G. Millais on faculties of, 49

Beddard, Dr. F. E., an authority on earthworms, 347

Bell’s _British Quadrupeds_, campaign against moles related in, 116

_Bicho moro._ _See_ Blister-beetle

Birds, stories about, 74-83

Bird’s-foot trefoil, on a prehistoric earthwork, 323-5

Blister-beetle, ravages of the, 309; appearance and smell of, 309; a rapacious fly enemy of, 311

Book of the Serpent, a, 186

Breydon Water, herons fishing in, 102

Britton, J., a story of a fox told by, 56

Browne, Sir Thomas, on fear of serpents, 178

Browning, grandfather of the poet, 330

Byron, potato with vinegar devoured by, 308

Caius, Dr., the British dogs of, 250

Cantharides, 309

Cat, friendship of, with rat, 234-7

Chaucer, 318

Chequered daffodil. _See_ Fritillary

Chillingham, the white bull of, his low place in the scheme of things, 34

Chinchilla, beauty and grace of, 287

_Clodothrix odorifera_, 349

Cobbe, Miss Frances Power, an admirer of Schopenhauer, 292

Columbine, the blue, in England, 328-31

Cormorant struggling with eel, 98; as a pet, 233

_Crotalus durissus_, New England rattlesnake, 205

Cuvier, on senses of bats, 45-8

Daisies, on old Roman Road, 322

Danish farmer, imaginary conversation with a Wiltshire pig-keeper, 298-9

Darwin, on the origin of the domestic dog, 275; on earthworms, 348-9

Daw, history of a tame, 77-8

Death by accident in wild life, 96

Death’s-head moth, seen in numbers, 217-19

Demeter, the Corn Mother, 312

Dog, the little red, character and anecdotes of, 238-46

Dogs, friendly with lamb, 128; effect of muzzling order on, 247-264; artificial instincts in, 272

Dolichotis, a Patagonian rodent, 287

Earthworms, effect of weed-killer on, 343; habits of, in relation to lawns, 345-6; London, 350-51; heath and sandy soil, 351; chalk soil, 351-2; cause of wide distribution of, 352-6

Elsie Venner Infelix, 209

_Epicauta adspersa._ _See_ Blister-beetle

Fayrer, Sir Joseph, a great ophiologist, 197

Fer-de-lance, an impression of the, 188

Flea, origin of the, 36

Flowers, beauty and charm of wild, 316; adorning waste lands and ruins, 322; on an old Roman road, 323; on a prehistoric earthwork, 323-5; rare and local, 326

Fox, beauty of the, 50-54; sentiment concerning the, 55; a South American music-loving, 58; adventures of a three-legged, 59-62

Fox terrier, character of the, 253

Fritillary, appearance of, seen growing in profusion, 331-4; beauty and singularity of the, 334-6

Geranium, _G. pyrenaicum_, 327; the blue, 327

Ghost-moth, dance of the, 221-2

Glanville, Ernest, on the African Icanti, 158-9

Goat’s-beard, various folk-names of, 317-18; singular habit of, 318-22

Gould, earliest writer on habits of ants, 251

Grass of Parnassus, beauty of the, 327

Grey, Viscount, squirrels tamed by, 233

Guanaco, a pet, in Patagonia and its habits, 125

Guinea (or Ginny) flower. _See_ Fritillary

Guira cuckoo, a mouse-killer, 97

Hake, Dr. Gordon, serpent poetry of, 197-200

Hawk-moths, 217; death’s-head, 217-19; crimson underwing, 219-221; humming-bird, 222-4

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, character of his genius, 203-4; in search of a weed, 338

Heron, bathing, 93; strange adventure with a, 94-6; flight of the, 103; a ghostly bird, 104; as a table-bird, 106-12

Heronry, a great, 47

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, story of a serpent girl, 201-9

Hopley, Miss C. C, on the serpent’s tongue, 139; her pet slow-worm, 233

Horse, habit of a tamed wild, 119-122; twitching muscle in the, 229

House-martin, accidentally killed, 98

Humming-bird, flight in the, 47; hawk-moth, 222-4

Huxley, on monographs, 190

Icanti, African serpent myth, 159

James, Henry, on living in a pine wood, 3

John-go-to-bed-at-noon, singular habit of, 316

Keats, serpent poetry of, 200

Kidd, Benjamin, humble-bees tamed by, 232, 280

Lacepede, on the serpent’s uses, 136

_Lagidium_, an Andean rodent, 287

Lang, Andrew, on drawing-room dogs, 292-4

Lawns, feeling about, 337; Sir Walter Raleigh quoted, 337-8; in relation to earthworms, 340-344

Leibnitz, on a talking dog, 279

Lemurs, beauty and docility of the, 286-7

Lindsay, Dr. Lauder, _Mental Evolution_ quoted, 279; on the dog’s spiritual nature, 288

Long, Sir Walter, dog-muzzling order of, 252

Luys, Dr., the revolving mirror of, 149

_Macroglossa stellatarum_, 224

Maize Mother, ancient worship of the, 312

Mallow, geranium-leafed scented, 327

Marmoset, charm of the domesticated, 285

Marmot, the prairie, 287-8

Mental evolution of animals, 281

Merry-lee-dance-a-pole, folk-name of a hawk-moth, 222

Millais, J. G., on the senses of bats, 49

Mole, whether injurious or not, 113-118; persecution of the, in France, 116; impending destruction of the, 116; the strenuous, 225-7; twitching muscle of the, 227-31

Morris, Mowbray, on dogs and their detractors, 291

Mother of the Waters, the mythical serpent, 169

_Mus decumanus_, 233

Mushrooms, growing in rings, 164

Natterjack, music of the, 89

Nunn, Mr. Joseph, the sparrow’s friend, 114

_Origin of Species_, 214

Owl, its supernatural reputation, 165

Painted snipe, caught in a mussel-shell, 99

Peaches and peach-stones, 307

Pig, social disposition of the, 295; a friendly, 297-302; a forest animal, 298; eating elder-berries, 301

Pine-snake, beauty and motions of the, 155

Pine woods, effect of living in, 1; wild life in, 4-14

Pipit, a fascinated, 149

Potato, the wild, 303; cultivated, 304; eaten with oil and vinegar, 307; ravages of the blister-beetle, 309-11; Mother of the, 312; manner of cooking the, in England, 313; what the doctors say, 314

Raleigh, Sir Walter, a shining Elizabethan, 312; his praise of gardens and lawns, 337-8

Rat, the unloved, 233; friendship with cat, 234-7

Rice Mother, 312

Romanes, Dr., _Mental Evolution of Animals_, 281

Rooks, their loose social law, 79-83

Royal Society for the Protection of Birds: Bird and Tree Day essays by school children, 6

Ruskin, on the serpent’s tongue, 134; on the serpent myth, 153; on serpent motions, 154

Russell, Dr., of Brighton, 1

Sanchoniathan, the Phoenician, 153, 191

Savernake Forest, a fox in, 52

Seal and conger eel, duel between, 98

Selous, on instinctive fear in horses, 176

Serpent, use of its tongue, 134-52; myths of a great, 158-9, 169-71; strangeness, 153; origin and universality of worship, 161; instinctive fear of the, 174-8; Satanic theory, 178-80; a Book of the, 186-91; the, in literature, 191

Sheep, individuality in, 123; a book-destroying, 124; a friend of dogs, 127

Sheldrake, beauty of the, 108

Shelley, his _Witch of Atlas_, 157

Silchester, the forest of, 84; excavation at, 347-9

Snake, a preserver of the, 16; taming a wild, 91-2; a frog-hunter, 144; shyness, 192; a tame, 280

Spallanzani, experiments on bats, 45-8

Sparrow-hawks, in pine wood, 4, 7

Spider, strategy of hunting, 145; as a pet, 232

Squirrel, fable of a, 63-9; adventures of a migrating, 70-73; migratory impulses, 70; taming the, 233; volatile character of the, 286

Stradling, Dr. Arthur, on the serpent’s tongue, 139

Stag, lower than the bat, 34

Starlings, killed by sparrow-hawk, 8

Stoat, a water-vole hunting, 86

Tabley, Lord de, ghost-moth poetry of, 222

Tehuelches, children of the Patagonian, 163

Thoreau, on the squirrel, 286; his “handful of rice” 297

Throstle, desire for worms of the caged, 75-7

Toad, the, as traveller, 84-9; concert music and marriage customs, 88-9; pleased to be caressed, 90; tongue and fly-catching of, 90-1

Traherne, the Herefordshire mystic, 224

Tregarthen, J. C., anecdotes of fox and otters reared with hounds, 132

Twitching muscle, mole, 228-31; dog, 228; horse, 229; man, 229-230; hare, 231

Tyndall and Hindhead, 1

Tyrant-bird, rapacious habits of a, 97

Vernal squill, first appearance of, 327

Viper, _Vipera berus_. _See_ Adder

Vizcacha, account of the, 130

Wasps, spiteful temper, 210-12; brilliant colouring, 213; diabolical instincts of, 214

Waterton, on heron’s fishing, 93

White, Gilbert, on a tame snake, 280

Willughby, the ornithologist, 250

Wright, Sir Almroth, on our skin-scraping habit, 338

Youatt, on a strange dog superstition, 277

THE END

_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

Transcriber's Notes:

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.