The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-04-14

not particularly useful; nevertheless they
are of intense interest to me because Of
what it has been.
For our scouring-rush was not always
the puny, insignificant thing we now see
it. 1t was once a mighty forest tree, OF
which this that hold in my hand is but
a degenerate descendant.
Like the ferns and the moses, our
scouring-rush belongs to the carboniferous
age. 1t has nothing to do with our mod
ern civilization. 1t had reached its high
est perfection and entered upon it's down
ward career before ever man appeared
upon earth. Its progenitors fourished
with the giant ferns, the great rank
moses, and the rest of the carbon storing
vegetation. In those early days the little
rush was, as / have said, a mighty tree,
growing 200 feet tall and spreading its
great whorls of branches in every direc-
ton.
Let US see what happened to the great
primeval tree, that we should only know
it in this degenerate creature of the bog.
Nothing, it would seem, could be more
commonplace than this commonest of
rushes, yet it represents in its humble ex-
istence reading from the Darwinian
Iliad. 1t is living example of the sur
vival of the fittest.
Now, survival of the fttest does not
necessarily mean survival of the best. The
scouring-rush is by no means better than
was its carboniferous ancestor 1t is only
filter to survive, which is why it is here.
Nature takes no note of good and better.
Her one aim is to fit the creature to sur
vive under the conditions that surround it.
To do this the evolutionary process may
work up or down or sidewise. In the case
of the scouring-rush it has worked down.
ward.
In the carboniferous age the air of the
earth was much warmer than it is now,
even in the tropics. The great mass
which constitutes this globe had not
cooled sufficiently to sustain any very
high forms of life There were no trees,
as we now understand the word, and very
little animal life. There were beetles,
spiders and scorpions and salamanders big
as alllgators, but no mammals, nor even
any birds. The world was still in twi-
light, warm, reeking with moisture both
in the air and on the earths surface.
These were the conditions in which our
great rush luxuriated. It's great spongy
stem and branches drank in food from the
poisonous air; its great creeping rootstocks
soaked 1T up from the morass beneath, and
the rush lowered high in air. In time it
died and the mighty stem fell back into
the waters of the bog. Then came some
terrible upheaval some cataclysm in which
the land sank, and the rocks and debris of
the sea floor were thrown upon the decay
ing vegetation. 1t was pressed and COM
pressed beneath this weight-the fronds of
the mighty ferns, the high stems of the
giant PUSHES, the great club-mosses, and
the primeval forest became peat-bog
Still greater pressure-a longer lapse of
icons, and the peat became coal.
But the evolutionary process still went
on. The rank gases of the atmosphere were
largely stored up in the earth. The earth
itself had cooled-the atmosphere was
rarer, purer. New life, new growths were
coming in, but the giant rush was starving.
1t could not find food in this thin air. Its
roots could not suck up enough moisture
to sustain life. 1t became smaller and
smaller. Flowers, seeds it never had borne
1t now gave up its leaves. Between every
two whorls of branches on our securing.
rush you will find a little brown toothed
sheath completely encircling the stem.
Each tooth was once a leaf, in the days of
the plants prosperity. Now that it has
learned the sweet uses of adversely
II can maintain no such extravaganza as
leaves, so they are as we see them. The
stem is hollow and is divided into closed
sections or joints just where each whorl of
branches is given off. There is also an
outer ring of tiny tubes, through which
the plant draws moisture from the earth.
1t is little higher order of creature than
the fern, but it is still a cryptogram--that is,
plant never bearing true flowers or seeds,
but prropagating by spores, as do the ferns.
And so, fallen upon hard lines, chilled,
stunted by the cold, having but brief
season of existence, when the cold winter
rains have ceased and the summer
droughts not yet begun, we have our
scouring-rush, only few inches high
And this branched stem that we see is not
fertile. IT'S enough for it that it sports
this waving green feather; the fertile
stems are not branched. They thrust them
selves above earth, pale, shrinking, live a
brief season, develop their spores and die
Indeed, they can hardly say that they
have lived. 1t is hard to say why they do
live. Their work is done; but theirs was
hardy stock, and they die hard. But our