Silver Fern Croziers

Fern croziers and spring. What more needs to be said?

This silver fern is growing in our garden on the sheltered shady side of the house, just by a path of steps which climb up the steep clay bank. They have a long way to go before they are the size of those growing in a gully on our neighbour's property which must have been growing since before the houses were built about 20 years ago, as theirs are approaching 4m tall. This plant however, must have been planted when the house was built and would I imagine have been two or three years old when planted. It is about as tall as me - well to be exact the crown (with croziers) is about as tall as me. Last year's fronds add another 1.5m in height.

Bird Feeder

Silvereyes have been flocking to a spare (& stale) bread bun which we tied up on our verandah. They are smaller than sparrows and dunnocks. The book says that males have a slightly more chestnut colour on their bellies - apparently, though I think it's hard to tell. They are also known as white-eyes or wax-eyes.

There was much squabbling and in-fighting as they sort out their dominance heirarchy. Some flitted their wings in appeasement. Some had full-on fisticuffs with talons almost locked together as they flew upwards; like miniscule birds-of-prey.

They first came from Australia in the mid nineteenth century, probably from Tasmania. And they didn't take long to spread right across the country. Now they are probably the commonest garden bird.

Cold Snap

A large storm the size of Australia was headed our way across the Tasman we were told on Friday. Snow was expected down to low levels and Southland farmers were advised to get their new-born lambs under cover. Hopefully they did, because further South they copped it. Here we got off with only a slight dusting on the hilltops.

You know it's spring when ... you get pretty pink cherry blossoms hidden from view by flakes of snow!

In the North Island they had very high winds and heaps of rain, trees came down bringing power lines with them. So, lucky Dunedin had a few snow flakes adn it was a bit chilly, but very pretty!

Remodel the Introduction

My Dear Parker – I have been so terribly pressed by my work that I have only just been able to finish the reading of your paper.
Very few pieces of work which have fallen in my way come near your account of the Struthious skull in point of clearness and completeness. It is a most admirable essay, and will make an epoch in this kind of inquiry.

I want you, however, to remodel the introduction, and to make some unessential but convenient difference in the arrangement of some of the figures.

Secondly, full as the appendix is of most valuable and interesting matter, I advise you for the present to keep it back.

My reason is that you have done justice neither to yourself nor to your topics, and that if the appendix is printed as it stands, your labour will be in great measure lost.

You start subjects enough for half a dozen papers, and partly from the compression thus resulting, and partly from the absence of illustrations, I do not believe there are half a dozen men in Europe who will be able to follow you.

Furthermore, though the appendix is relevant enough – every line of it – to those who have dived deep, as you and I have – to any one else it has all the aspects of a string of desultory discussions. As you father confessor, I forbid the publication of the appendix. After having had all this trouble with you I am not going to have you waste your powers for want of a little method, so I tell you.

What you are to do is this. You are to rewrite the introduction and to say that the present paper is the first of a series on the structure of the vertebrate skull... and then if you have stood good-temperedly the amount of badgering and bullying you will get from me whenever you come dutifully to report progress, you shall be left to your own devices in the third year to publish a paper on “The general structure and theory of the vertebrate skull.”

You have a brilliant field before you, and start such that no one is likely to catch you. Sit deliberately down over against the city, conquer it and make it your own, and don’t be wasting powder in knocking down old bastions with random shells.

I write jestingly, but I really am very much in earnest. Come and have a talk on the matter as soon as you can, for I should send in my report. You will find me in Jermyn Street, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday mornings, Thursday afternoon, but not Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon. Send a line to say when you will come. – Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley

Letter to William Kitchen Parker (1823-1890) from Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895). From The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley by his son Leonard Huxley. 2 vols. London, Macmillan, 1900.

Moss Garden

A capstone on an old gateway post was originally covered with pebble dash. The now-weathered cement provides a calcareous substrate for an intriguing mini-garden.

An old faithful - the yellow splash of a clump of Xanthoria lichen is quite noticeable; but as a herald of spring...

the fruiting capsule of a clump of moss growing at the top of the stone. This, I think, is a member of the Tortula genus. Most probably Tortula muralis - the specific epithet seems appropriate, and it is, after all, a very widely distributed and common moss.

Alpine Meadow

Spring is coming! Indeed in selected places, like here in the Botanic Gardens, it is already well on its way!

Undaunted Perserverance

... one would suppose that the faculty of adding anything whatever to natural knowledge was one possessed by extremely few persons. I believe, on the contrary, that any man possessed of average ability and somewhat more than average perseverance, is capable, if he will, of doing good original scientific work.

Any hardworking and commonly intelligent man, who likes his profession, will make a good soldier, or lawyer, or doctor, though that combination of powers which makes the great general, or the great jurist, or the great physician, is given to but few. So it is with the pursuit of Science: assuredly not every one of her followers, very probably not one among us now present, will become a Linnaeus, or a Cuvier, or an Agassiz.

It may not be given to any of us to make some brilliant discovery, or to first expound some illuminating generalization; but we can, each and all, if we will, do good and valuable work in elucidating the details of various branches of knowledge.

All that is needed for such work, besides some leisure, intelligence, and common-sense (and the more of each the better), is undaunted perseverance and absolute truthfulness; a perseverance unabated by failure after failure, and a truthfulness incapable of the least perversion (either by way of omission or commission) in the description of an observation or of an experiment, or of the least reluctance to acknowledge an error once it is found to have been made.

Moreover, this love of truth must extend to a constant searching and inquisition of the mind, with the perpetual endeavour to keep inferences from observation or experiment unbiased, so far as may be, by natural predilections or favourite theories.

Perfect success in such an endeavour is, perhaps, unattainable, but the scientific worker must ever strive after it; theories are necessary to guide and systematize his work, and to lead to its prosecution in new directions, but they must be servants, and not masters.

Quotation: Henry Newell Martin (1848-1896), student of Thomas Henry Huxley who was inaugural Professor of Physiology at Johns Hopkins University. Inaugural Address, The Study & Teaching of Biology. 1876.