The Island of the Colorblind

A year later, in his bizarre book Omphalos  – published just two years before the Origin of Species  – Gosse, who was both a brilliant naturalist and a religious fundamentalist, attempted to reconcile the existence of fossils (which seemed to testify to former ages) with his belief in a single, instantaneous act of Creation. In his theory of ‘Prochron-ism’ he suggested that the entire crust of the earth, complete with its cargo of fossil plants and animals, was created in an instant by God and had only the appearance of a past, but no real past going with it: thus there had never been any living forms corresponding to the fossils. In the same way that Adam had been created in an instant as a young man (never a child, never born, with no umbilical cord – though nonetheless with an umbilicus, an omphalos), he argued, so a cycad, full of leaf-scars, seemingly centuries old, might also be quite newly created.

Taking an imaginary tour of the earth, a single hour after the Creation, he invites the reader to look at a panorama of animals and plants:

I wish you to look at this Encephalartos. A horrid plant it is, a sort of caricature of the elegant Palms, somewhat as if a founder had essayed a cocoa-nut tree in cast iron. Out of the thick, rough, stiff stem spring a dozen of arching fronds, beset with sharp, sword-shaped leaflets, but having the rigidity of horn, of a greyish hue, all harsh and repulsive to excess. In the midst of this rigid coronal sits the fruit, like an immense pine-cone…It would be no unreasonable conjecture to suppose that this great Cycadaceous plant is seven or eight centuries old.…Nay, for this also has been created even now!

This extraordinary notion – one cannot call it a hypothesis, for it cannot in principle be either proved or disproved – had the distinction of earning the derision of paleontologists and theologians alike.

81

In his guide to Kew, Gosse includes a whimsical note on the Ci- botium there:

[It is] a singular vegetable production, of which, under the name of Scythian Lamb, many fabulous stories are told. It was said, among other things, to be part animal, part vegetable, and to have the power of devouring all the other plants in its vicinity. It is in reality nothing but the prostrate hairy stem of a fern, called Cibotium barometz, which, from its procumbent position and shaggy appearance, looks something like a crouching animal.

82

One cannot look at the cycads in Kew or in the Hortus without a sense of their frailty too, the extinction which constantly threatens species which are special and rare. This came home to me especially in the Kirstenbosch Gardens in Capetown, where more than fifty species of the African cycad Encephalartos grow. Some of these are common, some are rare. One is unique, because it comes from a single (male) plant, E. woodii, discovered by Dr. Medley Wood in 1895. Though cuttings of the original have been cultivated (propagated asexually and thus clones of the original), no other trees of this species, male or female, have ever been found – and unless an unknown female exists somewhere, E. woodii will never pollinate or mate; it will be the last of its kind on earth.

Seeing the magnificent solitary specimen at Kirstenbosch, unla-belled and surrounded by an iron fence to discourage poachers, reminded me of the story of Ishi, the last of his tribe. I was seeing here a cycad Ishi, and it made me think of how, hundreds of millions of years ago, the numbers of tree lycopods, tree horsetails, seed ferns, once so great, must have diminished to a critical extent until there were only a hundred, only a dozen, only a single one left – and finally, one day, none at all; only the sad, compressed memory held in the coal.