The miniatures among the flowers, which invite the pocket lens, are everywhere. For instance, common plantain, which invades lawns and paths as well as garden borders, comes to blossom in what looks like a faintly gray-green thumb on a long, slim stem, the whole head half the diameter of a lead pencil. Seen under the glass it is a compact mass of buds with scattered greenish-white four-petaled flowers. The peppergrass plant that grows at the edges of my garden bears tiny white flowers at the tips of its stems, flowers that mature into the peppery little flat seeds I sometimes pluck and chew for their tang. Even the bristly, fat green head on the common pigweed that flourishes in waste places everywhere is a mass of green blossoms that can be examined under the glass.
And don’t pass up that garden weed called purslane. Country folk have long known it as pussley. It grows in my garden, no matter how I try to be rid of it, and I have yet to see a garden that didn’t have a few plants of it somewhere around. Go to the garden in June, or any Summer week thereafter, and pluck a sprig of purslane. Look at the branch tips. There, hidden in the rosette of fleshy green leaves, you will see a fleck of golden yellow no bigger than a pinhead. That is the purslane blossom. It opens only in the morning sunshine. Under the glass it is seen as a greenish-yellow cup composed of five petals, each twin-lobed. It may have anywhere from seven to twelve stamens, each with tiny, glistening orange beads of pollen on its tip. A green style rises from the ovary at the blossom’s center and forks into five curved golden branches. All this in a space so small that it can be, and often is, hidden under a small drop of dew.
I fight the purslane in the garden all Summer long. But every morning when I see those golden flecks of miniature blossom I think of the portulaca in one corner of the flower garden, spreading its colorful, velvety petals to the sun. They are cousins, and I cherish the one, try in vain to be rid of the other. The only time I see any beauty in the purslane is when I look at those tiny golden cups through the ten-power glass.
Various grasses are rewarding to the person with a pocket glass, especially when they come to blossom—with caution, of course, if one is subject to hay fever. Grass flowers are simplified to the essential elements. Because grasses are pollinated by the wind rather than by insects, their blossoms have no petals. They consist of pollen-bearing stamens and ovaries with styles that are usually feathery to catch the almost invisible pollen. These stamens and ovaries are shielded somewhat by greenish bracts called glumes. If you would see flowers in utmost simplicity, look at the grass on your own lawn when it comes to head and blossom. The ten-power glass will show you how uncomplicated a flower can be.
I like to use the glass in April and May on trees and bushes as they open their flower buds. For every tree that has big, showy flowers such as the magnolia or the tulip tree, there are a hundred with inconspicuous blossoms with secrets for the glass to reveal. The poplars, the birches, and the aspens flower in catkins, as do the willows. Those catkins are of both sexes, sometimes on the same tree, sometimes on different trees. The male catkins, which produce the pollen, are the more conspicuous, sometimes four or five inches long and looking something like big caterpillars. The female catkins are much smaller and often have to be sought out. Under the glass, the male catkins can be seen as closely massed stamens which, as they mature, produce anthers at their tips and then pollen on the anthers. Stamens and anthers are of various shapes, varying with the species of the tree. The female catkins are little more than tufts of ovaries, each with its styles to catch the pollen. And again there is variety in the shape and color of ovaries and styles. The diversity of nature in shaping such essentially simple elements as stamens and ovaries, anthers and styles, is almost incredible. I marvel every Spring when I examine them with a glass, and I never set out for an hour’s look without spending at least twice that long.
When the maples come to blossom, not long after the poplars have hung out their catkins, they too invite close inspection. Maple flowers are very small, but they bloom in clusters. When they have petals, the petals are minute but they always come in fives. If there are no petals, the calyx is five-parted. The stamens are nearly always long, so long they make the flower tuft resemble a tassel. The flowers of sugar maples are greenish-yellow, those of swamp maples a deep, rich crimson. All are beautiful under the glass. Most maples come to bloom before the leaves appear.
Even the flowering dogwood invites a look with the glass. What we think of as the big white petals of the dogwood flower are not petals but bracts, leaflike elements that in the dogwood are white or, in some species, pink. The true flowers of the dogwood are only about a quarter inch across and are clustered at the center of those four white bracts. Each of these florets has four green sepals and four greenish-white petals, with the ovary and style in the center and stamens around the ovary. The glass reveals this clearly. This floral structure becomes obvious when the flowers have faded and the big white bracts are gone. Then each flower has become a green berry, making a berry cluster at the center of what we called the dogwood “flower.” Those berries mature into the familiar oval, lacquer-red dogwood berries of September, which are choice fare of the squirrels and any number of birds.
All members of the apple family, from the pasture rose to the apple tree, from the wild strawberry to the tall meadowsweet, are fair game for the man with a pocket lens, as are spirea and bridal wreath, common shrubs on suburban and country lawns. The flowers of all of them follow the rose’s rule of five—five green sepals, five petals, and a wealth of stamens arranged in circles around the multiple ovary. The ovary may be complex, as in the strawberry, or relatively simple, as in the apple where it is only five-part, again following that rule of five. Cut an apple crosswise and you can see that five-part, star-shaped center, each part with its seed and all enclosed in the fibrous vanes that make up what we call the core of the apple. Under the glass the tiny individual flowers in a spike of meadowsweet bloom can be seen as close kin in almost every way to the big, spicy apple blossom. I am forever fascinated by the varying shapes of the anthers, at the stamen tips, in all the rose family’s blossoms.
If one wants to enter a field that can lead to the semi-microscopic, one can also examine pollen under the ten-power glass. In size, the individual grains range from the diameter of a pin down to that of a pinpoint. And they come in almost every conceivable shape, from minute spheres to barrels, ovals, and drums. But the study of pollen calls for infinite patience and higher magnification. The pocket lens can only make one wish for a microscope with which to excursion into that vast, tantalizing world.
Still another world at least partially accessible to the pocket lens is that of the mosses and lichens, some varieties of which grow in almost every woodland and, indeed, even in places where no other form of plant life exists. Lichens really demand the use of a microscope for more than casual study, but the ten-power glass will reveal many interesting things about them. There are at least 2,000 kinds of lichen in America—some set the number considerably higher—but perhaps a dozen of them can be recognized by the amateur who is willing to learn a few fundamentals. Lichens never grow in cities or any area where fumes contaminate the air, but they can be found in rural woodlands and even on rocks in nearly any rural dooryard. They are familiar to mountain climbers, of course, because they are the only form of plant life that grows on high, cold peaks. They are the dominant form of plant life in Greenland and other such frigid areas. The reindeer moss of the Far North is a lichen. So is Old Man’s Beard, the gray-green hairlike growth on trees in the damp, cold spruce woods of the North. (Florida moss, which resembles Old Man’s Beard and grows on live oaks in the South, is not a lichen. It is a member of the pineapple family of plants, incredible as that seems, and is an epiphyte, a plant that lives on and in the air without need of roots in the soil.)
Lichens are really a dual form of life, algae and fungi linked so closely that they appear to be a single plant. This complex partnership is called symbiosis, in which the algae manufacture the food a
nd the fungi absorb the essential moisture. Neither can grow without the presence of the other. The algae in the partnership are closely related to those that grow as maplike green stains on tree trunks, and the fungi are related to the molds.
The most common lichens are of one of two forms, one crustlike, the other coral-like. The crust forms resemble fragments of leaves cemented to the surface of a rock. Some are lobed and ruffled, somewhat like lettuce leaves, and range in color from gray-green to red-green. Some are flat, smooth, and dark green above, sooty black beneath. On some islands off the Maine coast the yellow wall lichen, which is closely attached to the rocks, is so plentiful that the island cliffs are almost golden in appearance. Here in the hills of New England a species called Cladonia covers rocky ledges and barren patches with a faintly green-gray coral-like growth. One species of Cladonia also grows on old stumps and rotting logs and sends up little fingers, gray stalks, bearing brilliant red tips which are the plant’s reproductive organs. This species is called Scarlet-Crested Cladonia.
The mosses are altogether different from the lichens, though they often grow side by side. Mosses are very old plants, still primitive in many ways, and their life cycle is more like that of the ferns than of any other plants. They reproduce by spores, as the ferns do, and again like the ferns the moss spores produce plants quite different from the parent which in time send up both male and female organs and produce sperm and egg cells which unite and grow into the familiar spore-producing moss plants again. So there are two kinds of plants in every moss clump, those which grow spores and those which produce the egg and sperm cells.
Moss foliage varies from species to species, but the really spectacular distinction is in the spore heads. This phase of moss life is revealed in fascinating detail by the pocket lens.
The spore heads are borne on thread-thin stems that often are only a fraction of an inch tall and seldom are more than an inch. The spore head itself is a capsule which is seldom as large in diameter as a kitchen match and often is nearer the size of a common pin. The capsule assumes various forms, each peculiar to the species. The capsule of the Crisped Ulota, for instance, a species that grows on trees, is like a wide-mouthed urn. That of Webera moss, which grows on the soil, is a gently twisted horn. That of the Edenton, a brilliant yellow-green moss with flattened foliage, is shaped like a curved cow horn. Some mosses have bell-shaped capsules, some are like crook-necked gourds, some are like ridged balls or eggs. And, to repeat, all are minute.
These spore capsules or pods have lids or caps which drop off when the spores are ripe and ready to disperse. Once the lid has been cast off, the lip of the spore pod can be seen to have a fringe of teeth, sometimes only four, sometimes as many as sixty-four, but invariably in multiples of four. These teeth scatter the spores as they are spilled out by the wind or by a passing bird or animal. The stems on which the pods are borne are like hair-thin springs, and they jerk back and forth, showering the spores. The teeth on the rim of the pod swell up, fold over, and close the pod in damp weather, protecting the spores. When the rain or mist passes, they shrink and open the pod again.
Many of these details can be seen under the ten-power lens. I can count the teeth on some of the spore capsules, but not all of them. If I want to study a specimen, I bring home a tuft of moss and put it under a strong light here in my study, where there is neither wind nor shadow to set the filament waving or distract my eye. But half an hour spent seated beside a patch of moss in the edge of the woods, peering through that pocket lens, is always time well spent.
Moss, unlike the lichens, has no prejudice toward cities and contaminated air. Several species can be found in most urban areas if one knows where to look. I have taken more than a passing look at the moss in Trinity Churchyard, on lower Broadway in Manhattan, and I have found several species growing along the Hudson River waterfront, even on some of the old piers there. But mosses thrive better in the clean air of the country, and one can always find several species in old fields, on patches of thin soil at the roadside, in the thin soil on ledges of rocks, or on tree trunks or fallen logs in almost any damp, cool woodland.
In country or city there is still another world that invites the hand lens. That is the insect world. Flies, wasps, bees, beetles, mosquitoes, moths, and butterflies can be found almost anywhere.
The ten-power glass will reveal the structure of a housefly’s wing, for instance, or the head and remarkable mouth parts of that ubiquitous pest. It will even make understandable the fly’s ability to walk up a pane of glass or across the ceiling by showing the tiny pads on the fly’s foot, which somewhat resemble buttons of foam rubber. Or catch a honey bee and look at the hind leg and see the hairy area called the pollen basket, with which the bee carries pollen from blossom to hive. Look at the foreleg, with the “comb” the bee uses to clean and groom its antennae.
I am always fascinated by the heads of insects, especially by their eyes. Insects have two compound eyes, each consisting of a cluster of individual eye cells. These cells are almost always hexagonal in shape and are fitted together like the cells in a honeycomb. Most insects also have simple eyes of one cell each. The grasshopper, for instance, has three of these simple eyes on its forehead between the two big compound eyes. Through the glass the shape of the individual cells in the compound eyes can be seen in most insects.
Katydids and other members of the cricket family make their characteristic sounds by running a “scraper” on the lower surface of one forewing over a “file” on the other forewing. Under the glass both the toothed “file” and the “scraper” can be examined. So can the long, flexible antennae of all members of the cricket family. And speaking of antennae, look at the next mosquito you can catch. If the antennae are relatively short and smooth, the mosquito is a female. If they are long and feathery, the mosquito is a male. Only the females bite or sting. Male mosquitoes gather in swarms along my river in late Summer, create a loud evening hum, and sometimes die by the hundred on my front porch. But even when they are present in clouds we are seldom bitten. There seem to be few females in such swarms. The males apparently gather in clouds, hum a kind of swan song, and die in a sort of communal immolation. The antennae of moths and butterflies can be examined without a lens, but under the glass one can see details, particularly of the moth antennae, that are most interesting. It is a general rule that butterflies have simple antennae, hairlike and thickened at the tip, and that moths have feathery antennae, some of them looking like the wing feathers of a bird. But even more interesting, and demanding of the lens, are the scales that cover the wings of all moths and butterflies. These scales rub off on the fingers like dust when you handle a butterfly or moth. In some species the scales are too small to be examined under the ten-power lens, but in most of them the shape and color can readily be seen. Butterfly scales are shaped like long rectangles with one end gently notched, sometimes with one notch, sometimes with as many as three. The scales on a moth’s wings are always long and narrow, sometimes pointed, sometimes so finely divided that they appear fringed at the tip. When scales are scuffed off, the basic wing is revealed as a veined, transparent sheet like the wing of a fly or wasp. The scales provide the color. They also strengthen the wing, since they lie in an overlapping pattern like shingles on a house roof.
I get particular pleasure, as well as a kind of satisfaction, from searching out and examining the eggs of moths and butterflies, which are laid in clusters and masses, varying with the species, on leaves and twigs. These eggs have only one purpose, to perpetuate the species. They will hatch into caterpillars which will follow the intricate lepidopterian cycle, caterpillar, pupa, butterfly, egg, and caterpillar once more. That is the reason for those eggs. And in that light they need be no more than a fertilized life germ surrounded by a film of albuminous substance and encased in some kind of covering that will protect the germ from cold or drought. The logical shape is a sphere or an ovoid, and the color is of little consequence, except to conceal them.
Bu
t when I examine the eggs of the lepidoptera I find all shapes, many colors, and elaborate designs of color and texture. Some are shaped like barrels, some are cones, some perfect hemispheres, some like cheeses, some like turbans. And on the surface of these shapes are designs, ridges, lines, grooves, even geometric patterns. Some of the eggs look like tiny, carved gems. Besides these patterns, there are colored dots and colored lines, some of them microscopic, all of them arranged in symmetrical patterns. And the colors range from red to blue, from gold to green, from brown to brilliant yellow. The only uniformity I find is in the fact that the eggs of each species are always the same, in shape, in color, in decoration.
Human logic, scientific logic, would say that the colors are for either protection or attention. Protection or attention from what? Under my glass, those eggs are spectacular. I can’t imagine an insect or any bird that could overlook them. And the attention of another bird or insect would certainly be destructive. And in terms of scientific logic, those grooves and ridges should be lines of cleavage, where the egg would open when it hatched. But that isn’t the way it happens. Ridges, grooves, and colored markings disappear before the eggs hatch, and when the egg does hatch it simply opens, more or less at random.
I am left with no reason for those decorative markings and beautiful shapes, no plausible, logical reason. And somehow that delights me. The egg of a butterfly or a moth defies all the human utilitarian concepts. It is an egg, and it serves to perpetuate the species. But it is also an infinitesimal thing of beauty which needs no reason for being beautiful. It simply is. And that defiance of man’s insistence on mechanical meanings is worth many times the cost of that ten-power glass, many times the hours I have spent squinting through it at butterfly eggs. It renews my faith in nature and convinces me that there are limits to scientific understanding.