Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot

by Philip Henry Gosse

As beautiful, if less curious, is the crowded spike of purple blossom that adorns the tall stalk of this terrestrial Orchis. The flower-stalk springs from the midst of a few large spotted leaves, which terminate below in an irregular fleshy tuber of glutinous consistence. This tuber is shrivelled, and is in process of exhaustion and decay; but a horizontal stem has pushed out underground, which has at its extremity a second tuber, as yet immature, but plump and swelling. This growing tuber contains the elements of the leaves and flower-spike of next season: the shrivelling one was, last year at this period, in exactly the same condition as the swelling one is now; it too was pushed out horizontally from a preceding one which was then shrivelling, and so backward. These pre-existing stages can with certainty be announced by the vegetable physiologist; who yet would be deceived in this instance, because the plant has been but just created.

This elegant Gladiolus that displays its tall spike of crimson blossoms from the midst of its flattened folded leaves, affords us a similar example of retrospective energy. If I dig away the light soil from around its base, I discover two globose corms, fleshy swellings of the stem, accumulations of nutriment obtained during the vegetative activity of the plant, and destined to support it during the season of inaction, and therefore stored up for that purpose.

CORM OF GLADIOLUS IN JUNE.

The uppermost of these globose corms is that of the present season; it is as yet small and immature, being in process of formation by the assimilation, consolidation, and deposition of new matter by the action of the leaves. This is sheathed in the tubular bases of the leaves, which expand above; and it is seated on a larger, riper, and more spherical corm, which is wrapped in a brown fibrous skin. This is the matter which was deposited in the course of last spring and summer, and the brown skin is the remains of the leaves of last year. This corm has remained inactive, since the decay of last year's leaves, until this winter, when the root fibres, which we see descending from the lower surface, began to form, and an upward prolongation of the stem followed, which, as it grew, swelled into the upper corm.

In the centre of the under surface of the corm of last season, in a depression surrounded by the white root-fibres, there are some almost decayed remains of a deep brown hue. These are the last vestiges of the preceding year's corm, and they exhibit the condition in which the large corm will be next spring, when the small half-formed one will be in the state and position of this larger one, and will in like manner be surmounted by its rising successor.

Thus there are in this plant ocular proofs of two years' history before the present; yet these proofs are invalidated by the fact of its creation this day.

Behold now that singular plant, the Grass-tree (Kingia australis), displaying what seems an immense tuft of wiry grass elevated on the summit of a trunk which is formed of the united bases of myriads of decayed leaves, the representatives of many generations of these organs. The silvery leaves which constitute the existing crown, and the numerous spikes of blossom which stand up in a circle diverging from the midst of them, give to this plant a most striking effect. That, however, is not our present concern, but the evidences which we may be able to gather from it of a previous history. For some distance below the living leaves, the trunk is connected by the withered, hanging, but still persistent leaves of several successive developments, a ragged drapery, of which we might certainly say—

"——when unadorn'd, adorn'd the most."

The lower portion of the stem is, however, destitute of the decayed leaves themselves, the lozenge-formed bases of them alone remaining, still separable, indeed, but sufficiently compact to make in the aggregate a sub-cylindrical column of loose texture, which may in familiar parlance be termed a trunk. This portion is marked by alternate enlargements and constrictions of the outline, which appear to indicate seasonal growths.