Memories of the months. Sixth series

Front matter

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Contents

FLORA HYEMALIS . : FEATHERS

WILD SWANS . . . ; LEEK . . .

THE GENTLE ART OF BLAZON .

II

I have just finished cleaning out a foul wooden pipe with the tail feathers of a woodpigeon, an operation whichno smoker may pretermit who values his own health and comfort. Most of us, probably, perform the lustration with no reflection more profound than to weigh the respective merits for the purpose of the pigeon’s grey pointed flight feather and its exquisitely clouded feather from the tail. For my part, I never can use either without feeling some shame in putting a structure so beautiful and complex to a use so sordid There is, indeed, an intellectual treat in store for any one who has not examined a feather under a strong lens or microscope. It is best to start with a fairly large one, say,a woodpigeon’s primary or flight feather ;

1 British Flowering Plants, p. 417.

‘Feathers

8 FEATHERS for it is in the flight feathers that the qualities of strength and cohesion are brought to highest perfection.

Feathers, like the claws, the spurs, and the bill of a bird, the hooves, horns, and nails of a mammal, and the scales of fishes, are horny products of the epidermal cells of the skin. There lies before me a flight feather from a woodpigeon’s wing. It consists of three principal parts—the quill or calamus, the shaft or rhachis, and the outer and inner webs.

The quill is hollow, and more or less transparent. If it is held up against the light a series of opaque objects will be seen occupying the interior of the cylinder as far as its junction with the solid shaft. Remove one side of the quill with a sharp penknife, and the opaque objects will appear as a string of little colourless caps consisting of very thin horny flakes. There are fourteen of these caps in the feather before me; they appear to be functionless—waste products of growth; but German ornithologists dignify them by the name of die Seele, ‘the soul’ of the feather.

The quill is a hollow cylinder, but the shaft which it supports is solid, quadrangular in transverse section, formed externally of strong horny substance and filled with dense white pith. It has a well-marked furrow along the under side and tapers to an extremely fine point.

Thus far the structure of this feather is fairly simple, combining the maximum of strength with a minimum of weight and material. The outer and inner webs are of far more delicate and complex character. They are composed of hundreds of rami, termed in English, not very appropriately, ‘barbs.’ Those of the outer or forward web, which has to meet the air in flying and do battle with all kinds of weather, are much shorter and stiffer than those on the inner or rearward web. A small portion of the web on the lower part of the shaft, chiefly on the outer or forward side, consists of down, serving to protect the skin and sinews of the wing from cold. The rest of the web is made up of the aforesaid ram or barbs—thin, narrow plates or strips of horny material growing out of the shaft, each one individually distinct, but all so closely packed together as to form a continuous surface or ‘web.’ The barbs on the inner or rearward web are much longer and more pliant than those on the forward web. The inner web of the pigeon’s flight feather before me, 84 inches in length, is made up of close on four hundred of these barbs. In the inner web of a crane’s flight feather the late Professor Newton counted about six hundred and fifty barbs.

Now, however closely the barbs were packed together (it would be impossible to plant them more closely than they stand), and however firmly they were attached to the shaft (it requires a pretty sharp tug to pull them off it), they would never cling together closely enough to stand the rough work which is inevitable in flight unless further provision were made for knitting them together. Such provision is not wanting in the shape of mechanism which the deftest of human fingers are not equal to constructing. It requires a good strong lens to reveal the design.

The upper edge of each ramus or barb is thicker than the lower edge, and this thicker edge is furnished with an immense number of radii or barbules. These bar-

10 FEATHERS bules are not of the same design on both sides of the barb. Under the microscope it will be seen that those on the side directed towards the tip of the feather (termed ‘distal’ barbules) are furnished with a row of hooks—hamuli; while the barbules on the side of the barb directed towards the root of the feather (‘proximal’ barbules) have their ends doubled up. The hooks of the distal barbules on one barb overlap the proximal barbules on the next barb and hook themselves on to the doubled ends, thus forming astrong close web; and so the feather is complete.

The number of these barbules is so vast as to defy any but the most patient investigator. Professor Newton found that, in the crane’s flight feather referred to above, every barb bore about six hundred pairs of barbules—that is, some eight hundred thousand in the. inner web of the feather alone; to which must be added perhaps four hundred thousand in the outer web. Over one million barbules in a single feather! and who shall number the feathers clothing the whole bird? Nor is the marvel diminished when one reflects that this elaborate clothing is cast aside and a fresh suit provided every year of a bird’s life. Plwma haud interest— it matters not a feather ’—ran the Roman proverb, adopting a feather as the type of all that is most trivial and of least value.

Possibly a little insight into the construction of a feather may incline one to cast about for a truer symbol of insignificance—say, the historic ‘scrap of paper. At all events, it ought to deepen the indignation with which every true and understanding lover of Nature regards the practice of depriving birds of the power of flight by maiming them ofa pinion. Upon no class of birds is this barbarity more commonly inflicted than what are called ornamental water-fowl. The commanders of some of the German prison-camps were brutal and cruel enough, God knoweth, to the poor fellows whom the fortune of war placed in their power ; but I have not heard that any of them cut off a foot of a prisoner to prevent him escaping. When I walk through St. James's Park to Westminster I avoid the path that runs past the prison-yard of the pelicans, so profound is my commiseration for these grotesque, archaic noblemen, condemned to shiver through lifelong detention under murky London skies, dreaming wistfully of their youth on the sun-baked shores of Nile.

If any one were to ask me why birds should have been provided with an organ of flight of such extraordinary complexity as a wing composed of feathers, instead of the relatively simple arrangement of a membrane stretched upon the digits of a bat or the exceedingly effective meshed wing of a dragon-fly, I should be at no loss for an answer, even if I thought fit to envelop it in the fine periphrasis which I once heard spoken by a witness before a Select Committee of the House of Commons. A question was addressed to him to which any common mortal might have replied ‘I don’t know’ ; but this witness, being a Civil Servant, thought it incumbent upon him to use phraseology appropriate to the dignity of his department. ‘The honourable member,’ said he, ‘is interrogating me upon a subject, cognisance of which on my part is a matter of impossibility.’

12 FEATHERS

One advantage a bird possesses over the bat or the dragon-fly, is that if the membrane of the wing of either the beast or the insect is torn or destroyed, it cannot be repaired; whereas if a bird loses its flight feathers through accident of weather or combat, it has only to wait till the next moult to receive a brand new outfit.

Now I don’t know what inference my readers may draw from the contemplation of the structure I have endeavoured to describe—whether they feel constrained to recognise it as the outcome of design, the result of forces working in accordance with laws established by a Supreme Power—or whether they share the opinion of Harriet Martineau and her collaborateur Henry Atkinson, who scoffed at all believers in design as ‘teleologists’ and announced that ‘the laws of matter are fundamental and sufficient in themselves. To call Nature’s doings and the fitness and form of things design is absurd.’ My own limited apprehension is unable to visualise any ‘laws’ without a lawgiver. While my poor intelligence receives no help from dogma defining with analytical precision the nature, attributes, and purpose of the lawgiver, the Athanasian Creed itself exacts less from the understanding than the dismal Martineau doctrine that ‘Philosophy finds no God in nature; no personal being or creator, nor sees the want of any.’

‘Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; Have sight of Proteus rising from the lea, Or hear old Triton blow his weathered horn.’